People Who Work for a Living, and Social Divisions
One of the most universal human cognitive defaults is the out-of-sight-out-of-mind phenomenon. Even after passing the stage as infants where we are no longer confused about object permanence, we can quickly forget about something that is not immediately salient on an ongoing basis. In fact, many of the cognitive biases that make up the messy field of behavioral economics (and its subfield in legal scholarship) are based on people's tendency not to think about anything that is not in front of them (or has not been there very recently).
I will get back to writing directly about the ongoing collapse of the US constitutional system next week, but I thought I would begin the new year by recalling that the much-decried "divisiveness" in American political and social culture can be traced in some part to the ability of favored minorities of people to separate themselves from Others. This has happened in every major culture at every point in history, at least based on my limited knowledge of such things, with the most infamous moment being Marie Antoinette's (probably apocryphal) "Let them eat cake." But the universality of the phenomenon does not mean that it happens in equal measure at all times and in all places. We knew that the US's recent return to Gilded Age-level inequality would inevitably corrode social norms in new and especially toxic ways, and it has.
Consider a small anecdote from a very narrow social situation. When I was in graduate school, I received several years of free room and board by serving as a "resident tutor" in an undergraduate residence. In addition to graduate students and young professors serving as tutors, the residence was officially run by a full professor who was archaically (and creepily) titled "the House Master." He and his wife also lived in the residence, but they were physically and thus psychologically separated from the hoi polloi (undergraduates and tutors).
One of the seemingly trivial separations among the "masters" and everyone else was that the US Mail was delivered directly to the Masters' Residence, whereas everyone else's mail was handled separately in a different part of the residence. Noting that my story is set in the 1980's, I can assure readers that mail delivery mattered a lot. Checks, acceptance/rejection letters for jobs, love letters, and everything else hinged on the US Postal Service and ultimately the mail arriving in the right hands. For several months, however, there was a problem with regular mail delivery to our residence, and nearly everyone was harmed in some way (often quite significantly). Everyone, that is, except for the "masters."
The undergraduates asked the tutors to do something, and we asked our feudal lords to intervene. Their response: "Oh, really? Gee, that's not good. We should get that fixed. Let's look into it." A month went by with nothing changing, so we brought it up again at the next opportunity for supplication (aka the "monthly tutors meeting"). The response: "Oh, right. That hasn't been fixed yet? We had no idea."
And that is precisely the point. They had no idea. and they had no reason to have any idea, other than having been told about it once at the end of a meeting with a multi-item agenda. They then went back to living their lives, lives in which there were no inconveniences or worse from delayed or lost mail. Must be nice. More to the point, must be easy to forget that others are not so lucky.
Why think about this now? We are now in the second half of a two-week period in which "everyone is off work," because both Christmas Day and New Year's Day were on Wednesdays this time around. When those holidays fall on any other day of the week, there are fewer "normal" days off, such as when both are on Friday and the unofficial holiday period runs from Thursday the 24th through Sunday the 3rd. This year, however, we are in the midst of a sixteen-day period in which some of us can very easily think that everything is on hold.
As it happens, I needed to take care of some matters this week that were quite time-sensitive and that required seeking action from a number of different offices, both government and private. When this came up on Monday the 30th, I thought: "Oh, no. Nothing will be open. I'm not going to be able to get this done for another week." In fact, however, every place that I needed was open on the 31st, and I was able to get everything handled in a timely way. Yay for me.
Even so, I was more than a bit uncomfortable about the fact that there was, for example, one young woman working alone in the office of a private firm on the 31st. She was upbeat and helpful, despite the holiday schedule to which she had been assigned. I thanked her and asked: "Are you working a half day?" Keeping up her smile, she allowed that maybe she might be able to leave a bit before 5pm if things were very quiet. I had nearly the same conversation with a restaurant worker later that morning. One of my stops was at the local police station, and although one might expect that of course emergency service personnel would be on duty, in fact all of the normal functions of Toronto Police Services were fully staffed by people who were working diligently at their jobs.
By this point, readers will surely have noticed how much my privilege informs my response to all of this. Even though my reaction was quite positive and appreciative, I have long since passed the point in my life where I was in a position of needing to work on a specific day because the boss said so. People work because they have to, and so did I, but I ended up in a job where I could presume that I was on my own for several weeks (often more than a month) around the holidays. It need not be a matter of condescension toward "low-level workers" but genuine surprise to be re-confronted with a fact of life for most working people that I have not had to worry about directly for decades.
Again, we are not only talking about the more obvious "essential" job categories, where air travel, hotels and restaurants, and so on are in heavy use over holiday periods. We see TSA agents, hotel clerks, and so on, so we know that those are people who have not had the luxury of taking the holidays off. Even though we are surrounded by people who work to live on a daily basis, it was all too easy for me to somehow presume that most people have holidays and near-holidays off.
None of this is news, but that is the point. When the world's richest men tell people that they have to work from an office, even though we have years of experience demonstrating how many office jobs are easily done from home, it is largely a power trip but also quite likely a matter of simply having no basis on which to understand how much harder the workers' lives will become due to the "master's" whim. The world's richest man openly says that unions should not even exist (while he brags about violating labor laws by firing union organizers). The world's next-richest man has not budged even from the cruel limitations on bathroom breaks in his high-stress warehouses.
So here is a non-novel insight: We are not all in this together. What might be a bit new is the degree to which even many of the non-masters of our universe take for granted our advantages and assume without serious thought that everyone can: take a day off if their kid is sick, miss a paycheck without being evicted from their home, get their bank to waive a late fee "just this once," take a mental health day, get divorced without the weaker party being cast into a vortex of non-dischargeable and crippling debt, or even talk to our supervisor and imagine that we will be treated with dignity and respect.
As more and more people find it impossible to put themselves in anyone else's shoes, it becomes too easy to think that people who need food stamps will respond to "work incentives" (based on a presumption that they are being lazy) or that health insurance should deny coverage to people for preexisting conditions. Others become more othered, and empathy dries up. More and more workplaces have needed to post "Don't be abusive to our employees" signs, even years after the pandemic shutdowns ended.
I am not at all saying that this social and economic stratification explains all of our current problems. Much of the recent election results can, after all, be readily explained by unvarnished sexism and racism. Even so, when society as a whole mirrors the "masters get their own mail delivery, so they assume everyone else is doing fine, too" problem on a grand scale, we should not be surprised that people -- even people who are not trying to be callous -- will lose the plot and forget about how relatively good their lives are. Not everyone can even take half-days on New Year's Eve, and because that fact surprised me, I know that I am one of the people who needs to remind myself on a very conscious basis about how other people live.