Why are so many Americans so angry?
I recently got involved on LinkedIn in a discussion prompted by Elon Musk’s demand that all federal employees provide him with a list of five things they had accomplished that week. Anger was widely displayed in the LinkedIn feed, mostly against the federal employees, and one commentator in particular, a psychiatrist called Jeffrey Junig, seemed especially upset that some of them (surely not all of them?) were allowed to work from home. In the course of his contribution, he made the comment that “Americans figured it out. They want the federal workforce to work similar to how THEY work”.
I wrote back to ask him how he thought it would be possible to make any use at all of the many thousands of responses this directive would produce without employing a whole lot more federal employees to look at them but as a throw-away last line, I unwisely asked ‘are the federal workforce not Americans?’
It was unwise, because not only did I not get any closer to finding out how the responses would be assessed, but Jeffrey devoted the whole of his reply to that one sentence. It went like this:
“Of course government workers are Americans (I prefer US citizens because Mexicans and Canadians and Bolivians and Brazilians are ‘Americans’. So what? My town’s largest employer laid off 3% of the town 6 months ago. And of course, people are laid off every month from almost every type of job. Tech had their ‘bloodbath’ a couple years ago.
State and government workers are the lucky few who have pensions and CANNOT be fired unless they are grossly incompetent. Can you imagine? How SPECIAL! They get to work from home since COVID when the people they ‘serve’ commute. Shouldn’t our government workers’ lives reflect those they serve? At one point those workers made less than others. Now their unions have gotten raise after raise beyond the cost of inflation, which the government created. Most of my patients make $20/hr doing hard work, on site. $41K per year. Maybe 2 weeks vacation. No pension. Few can afford to contribute to a 401K.
So they are very SPECIAL US Citizens with special benefits. The LEAST they could do is work harder than most workers. That will never happen… so how about going to the office? If that is too much headache, doing their laundry at night like the rest of us, they should go”
This is indeed a very angry man. I responded by saying that
Clearly it was a mistake on my part to even mention, however briefly, the distinction you seemed to see between ‘Americans’ and ‘the federal work force’. It triggered something that led to an entire comment by you that dealt with nothing else.
So I never got clarification on the points that really interested me, these being
Is your use of AI simply as a rather superior search engine?
Will the OPM evaluation be restricted to seeing whether an employee merely replies to the Musk email, ignoring the content of that reply?
Would you agree that such an evaluation would be less than useless in evaluating employee performance?
I guess you are not going to answer my questions, and I have no right to expect you to do so. They were not that important anyway.
However, in the light of your earlier comment, and now and more importantly, in the light of yesterday’s scenes in the Oval Office, I have another to which I would value an answer.
Which, of course, you are under no obligation to provide.
Why are so many Americans so angry?
You have a beautiful country with abundant natural resources, and live under a constitution that guarantees liberties that few other peoples possess. Your middle classes live lives of peace and prosperity that are the envy of the world. Yet the posts from Middle America I see on Li, and in your comment, are full of anger. I have seen people living in mud huts on the edge of a howling desert who are happier than you.
Why is this? Perhaps you, as a psychiatrist, can tell me.
Is it rich man’s paranoia – the fear that your riches may be taken from you? Or lives lived in the belief that one man’s gain must always involve another’s loss? Or something else? Why do you rail against benefits you see enjoyed by federal employees, and want to drag them down, instead of wishing to see all your fellow citizens raised to their level?
I never got an answer to that, so I am still left wondering why so many Americans, with all the advantages and benefits I listed, seem more angry than the citizens of any of the other countries I have visited.
Is it for the reasons I suggested? Or is it guilt at living in a land that was taken from other people by force ? Or is it the discovery that the wonders that the American Dream promised for everyone are being monopolised by just a few? Or is it because Americans, having gone quite a long way down the road set out in Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’, have discovered that, however far they go, they are no happier?
I did think that psychiatrist would be able to tell me.