Don't Expect Any Gratitude For Fixing Society
I’ve talked to many people who imagine that their political reforms will fix all our problems, and then once they’ve done so, the people will be grateful and appreciate their new, functional society and all the great things you’ve given them, so things will be nice and stable.
The first part has worked sometimes. The second part does not work. People have tried since the Old Testament and it fails reliably.
When Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, a recurring theme is the Israelites’ ingratitude. They complain constantly about all the things they left behind in Egypt, they make plans to return, at one point they complain that God has brought them to the desert to die of thirst while they are eating the miraculous food He created to keep them alive. Frankly the strongest evidence for the Biblical miracles being true is how it depicts the recipients complaining about everything rather than falling down in awe.
Even without divine intervention, there have been plenty of times that reforms have improved things, whether for all of society or for some particular group. In the 20th century, Americans decided they would not abide old people suffering in poverty, and created government payment programs for their benefit. Today, between Social Security and Medicare, about $2.5 trillion goes to paying the elderly. This is about 37% of the total federal budget, roughly one and a half times what the entire U.S. military spends. Do the recipients say “I am so glad I live in a generous society which provides for me as I become frail and unable to provide for myself?” Absolutely not. Most see these payments as an unremarkable and automatic background fact of the world, more like rain from the sky than like a sacrifice others are making to care for them.
The attitude is much the same for every other redistribution program. Gratitude for SNAP or WIC or Medicaid is not so rare as gratitude for Social Security, which is to say that I have heard recipients express gratitude more than zero times, but it is certainly not the norm. “Society never did anything for me, I had to grow up on food stamps and section 8” is a feeling common enough to be a cliche. Like the Israelites who complained of the manna they were eating, the outside help is taken for granted so deeply that the fact of being helped becomes a grievance.
In the absolute most extreme cases, if you literally go to war on someone’s behalf and get blown into chunks of meat to help them, this is enough that people will feel grateful—temporarily. The people who personally remember what you saved them from will give thanks. Their descendants mostly will not.
I read a memoir by a former slave freed in the American Civil War, who writes of her grandmother Dolly Reed:
The hardest blow to [my grandmother] was the failure of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank in Savannah, for in that bank she had placed her savings, about three thousand dollars [roughly six or seven years of a median worker’s wages] … she said, “I will leave it all in God’s hand. If the Yankees did take all our money, they freed my race; God will take care of us.”
While Reed’s expression is the most vehement of these I’ve seen, gratitude to the Union was the norm among the freed slaves who actually lived through the Emancipation Proclamation, and who often personally met some of the Yankee soldiers who fought and died.
The freedmen’s gratitude died with them. Mitch Kachun’s “Festivals of Freedom” documents the fervor of early emancipation celebrations, like Freedom Day and Juneteenth, and how this fell off with the next generation. By the turn of the century, the older generation lamented “a steady decline in attendance upon Emancipation Day observances” and a drop in their ideological content: “While the recreation and amusements enjoyed by the thousands of colored people present were perhaps good in their places, it would have meant so much more had this followed an appropriate program including the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and an inspiring address.” Meanwhile the younger Black intellectuals argued that social progress demanded the end of emancipation celebrations in favor of focus on “a new emancipation”: “The sooner the Negro forgets that he was once a slave, the better. The sooner he quits celebrating the day when one white man took him away from another, the better.” In the century since then, historical memory has trended steadily further in the same direction.
All this is entirely separate from whether these things are worth doing. You can improve the world. You can make people’s lives better. Americans are strongly in favor of all the programs in this essay for reasons that have very little to do with expecting the recipients to be grateful.
The point is that, if you fix things, don’t expect to receive much gratitude in return. The professionals in your field might give you a plaque, and the intellectuals might write some blog posts about how your work helped things. But you should understand that the median person on the street will just accept your better world as their due, and continue agitating for the next thing. If they think of your work at all, it’s as likely to be to complain that you took too long.