When There Are No Demons

Not so long ago in geological terms, people decided that living together in communities was a good idea. While some remained rugged individualists, or worked in rural occupations like farming, many who had the choice saw the benefit in creating small villages.

Pretty soon, it became obvious that the village needed one well. One really good, shared well made more sense than a hundred shallow wells in front yards, and every household only needed to kick in a small amount of money to make one high-quality village well a reality.

Not long after that, villagers saw the sense in grazing the family cow on a village common. Again, the cost per household was not high, and it meant you didn’t have to buy your own land.

Shortly thereafter, villagers realized that they needed somebody to keep the well clean and the village common properly tended. So, they hired a couple of local people, and once again the small costs were shared. These local people were popular and welcome. Everybody waved to them, the work they did for the community was valued, and the local butcher gave them a discount.

Then something happened.

On the way to creating larger villages, and then towns, and finally great cities and a mostly urban community, we lost affinity for our public employees. We stopped valuing their labor, started telling bad jokes, and somehow felt that they were indentured to us because they’d chosen to earn their salaries by working on behalf of the whole community.

Certainly, we’ve all had bad experiences. We’ve all dealt with public employees who were lazy, arrogant, indifferent, dismissive and outright nasty. But the demonization of a whole class of workers by a frustrated and angry public is something new. And the dynamic behind a wholesale assault on public employees goes far beyond just a Trump or a Musk. The assault is only possible because there’s widespread public support for it. The sounds you hear as the doors are broken down are not gasps of concern but a chorus of cheering.

Albert Einstein said that the solution to most problems is found one step above the level of awareness that created them in the first place. In this example, we should be concerned less with politicians riding a wave of anger and resentment than we should with what caused the public anger and resentment in the first place. How did we get here? How did we get from a friendly wave to the person who maintains the village well to a general attitude of disdain and “serves them right” for the people who run our transport system, test the drugs we take and respond to natural disasters?

The answer, of course, is that it’s complicated. One major factor is that we no longer know the well-maintainer well enough to wave to. Another is that while a small village may be easy to understand, a great city or a great nation is fantastically complicated. Amid that complexity we lose our human connection, our public servants no longer have a face, and we find it easy to project onto that blank screen every frustration, barrier, issue and complaint we experience in the journey of our daily life. The ancients used to blame the various Gods for their frustrations, and we blame the faceless “system” that somehow frustrates us but never includes us. It’s not clear that our civilization has advanced very far in that sense.

Seismic policy shifts in societies are almost always driven by seismic public sentiment. Say what you like about politicians, but they are very adept at detecting and satisfying public mood. Up close, when we see how the sausage is made, the results are often alarming.

Stories like The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs show the perils of getting everything we think we want. The complexity of modern life tends to always ensure that there are unintended consequences. When it’s your own commute to work that’s held up by unmaintained and unplanned roads, or your own lifesaving drug that gets delayed for approval, or your own farm that receives no response for disaster aid, it hits different. Suddenly you want to know why the village well is dirty or there’s no grass on the common.

So, let’s spare a thought and some consideration for the public servants who signed on to make our national village possible. How we got to this point, where everyone from late-night comics to friends in a bar to the Great American Voter wants their public servants to live in fear, with the work they do for us paralyzed to a standstill, is an interesting question. Perhaps as a community we should be thinking about the second question in all such change, the only important one, the big one.

What’s next?