Why Care Provokes Hate and Animosity toward Government
In any situation where people face a serious threat to their wellbeing, we would expect to see their need for care heightened and expressed in a search for someone ready and able to provide it. This expectation can make it difficult to understand the presence of powerful trends moving people in the opposite direction: toward hostility to those who seek to provide care and to those who seek to be cared for.
Amber Elliott
A poignant example of the way a threat provokes not seeking care but hostility toward it was provided by Amber Elliott, a Missouri county health director (in Saslow). Elliot considers her job non-partisan. She just follows the facts. And the facts are grim. The test positivity rate is 25%; hospitals are at capacity. Yet she is under attack. Her effort to care for the people in her county is seen, by some, as the expression of an aggressive political agenda with which they are sharply at odds.
She admits to having an agenda:
Okay, fine. I do have an agenda. I want disease transmission to go down. I want to keep this community safe. I want fewer people to die. Why is that controversial? … I’m young and I’m motivated, and I took this job in January because public health is my absolute love. It doesn’t pay well, but would I rather be treating people who already have a disease or helping to prevent it? That’s what we do. We help take care of people. At one point this summer, I worked 90 days straight trying to hold this virus at bay, and my whole staff was basically like that.
In response to her efforts to take care of people, she receives threats:
I get threatening messages from people saying they’re watching me. They followed my family to the park and took pictures of my kids. How insane is that? I know it’s my job to be out front talking about the importance of public health — educating people, keeping them safe. Now it kind of scares me.
By now, we are all familiar with the politicization of care in the US. The idea that care should be affordable and available to all became the central item in twelve years of Republican Party attacks on President Obama, whose purpose in promoting the Affordable Care Act was to assure that people received the care they needed. How much of a reach would it be to think that, among other things, it was care itself that attracted some if not most of this hostility?
The emotional meaning of care becomes complex. We seek it and we shun it. We shun care because needing care signals our failure to function as an adult in an adult world.
Early in life, care is all we want. As we mature, we develop the ability to care for ourselves, at least to a degree. Indeed, because it is a capacity identified with adulthood, being able to care for ourselves is our goal. But this does not mean that our need to be cared for, to have someone for whom our wellbeing matters, goes away. On the contrary, it remains an important part of our lives and of our capacity to form connections with others. Yet, the association of being an adult with being able to care for ourselves creates in us a measure of ambivalence about our continuing need to be cared for. The emotional meaning of care becomes complex. We seek it and we shun it. We shun care because needing care signals our failure to function as an adult in an adult world. Yet, while a degree of hostility towards care may be inevitable, this can hardly account for the hostility directed at care evidenced in the experience of the Affordable Care Act and in the sad fate of Amber Elliot who only wanted to care about others.
What does Elliott wish to do that provokes hostility? One possibility involves the way we are connected to suffering. Attacks on care, after all, are attacks on those who would alleviate suffering. They therefore suggest that our suffering can be alleviated and that it can be alleviated by finding someone who cares. If our early experience of seeking care from our caregivers did little to alleviate our suffering or even exacerbated it, then we can understand why, as adults, we might feel hostility toward anyone who offers to care for us. Not only do we not believe them, we can experience the offer of care as a hostile act.
Indeed, we can experience the word “care” itself as holding the power to cause our suffering. If this is the case, our first goal is to silence those who would use the word and, in using it, evoke painful memories.
Indeed, we can experience the word “care” itself as holding the power to cause our suffering. If this is the case, our first goal is to silence those who would use the word and, in using it, evoke painful memories. One element, then, in the imagined connection between Elliott and her attackers is the belief on their part, however unconscious, in the power of words to create reality; in this case, the power of the word care to cause the absence of care and the suffering attendant upon that absence.
What about the specific content of the threats? What do the attackers tell Elliott they will do to her and in so doing tell us about themselves? They tell her that they watch her and her family; they follow her to the park; they take pictures of her children; they know where she lives. A central element in these messages is: unless she stops what she is doing, they will make sure neither she nor her family will ever feel safe. Emotionally, this message can have the following meaning: If you persist in talking about care, we will make sure that you have the experience of care that we had, so that every time you use the word care and talk about taking care of others you will immediately think of how unsafe you are. Rather than associating care with safety, you will associate it with feeling unsafe. If you really care about your family, and if you really wish to care for us, you will stop talking about care. Talking about care causes suffering.
This, then, is the reality to which connection must be blocked. And, since, early in life, the relationship of being cared for is the whole of emotional reality, all subsequent experience of care can be infected with the residue of the early relationship with the consequence that caring about others and being cared about must not be allowed to happen.
All of this may have some bearing on the matter of hostility toward government, especially toward the involvement of government in the provision of welfare. The use of government to assure welfare can be experienced as the empowerment of government to do harm because of the connection between being cared for and doing harm to. The more powerful this connection, the more intense the hostility to a government bent on assuring the provision of care to those who need it.
But distrust extends well beyond the pandemic. It fuels the long-standing program of limited government associated with the Republican Party.
Once government is linked to care and care is associated with neglect, distrust of government is the inevitable result. This distrust manifested itself throughout the pandemic, most notably in the form of vaccine resistance. But distrust extends well beyond the pandemic. It fuels the long-standing program of limited government associated with the Republican Party. Many observers have noted, correctly, that this program contains a significant element of aggression, even hatred toward those who are in special need of care. But the seemingly simple accounts for this animosity couched in the language of racism can fall well short of offering an explanation. Indeed, accusations of racism tend more to offer a morally-invested labelling than an explanation. Perhaps more attention to the psychodynamic process surrounding the matter of care can move us in the direction of an understanding rather than conflict-enhancing moral condemnation.
References
Saslow, E. (2020) Voices from the pandemic, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/18/health-care-worker-threats-coronavirus/?arc404=true retrieved 11/19/2020