Deference as Currency

A near universal in USAmerican culture is the strident assumption that kindness, or all too often, perceived kindness, must be repaid with grovelling subservience and genuflecting, or it is undeserved after the fact and subject to retraction.  If you do someone a “favor” they’re supposed to kiss your ass right?  This is, in fact, the only reason many people of this mindset extend any kindness at all, just to collect their cookies for being kind and get their ass-kissing.

This is the reason panhandlers feel compelled to say “God bless you”  upon being given anything, to appease the Puritan culture.  This is the reason so-called “Allies” of marginalized groups — groups such as BIPOC, Trans people and other queer people, and houseless people — only maintain their “allyship” until the first bit of push-back or criticism from the group they claim to ally with, over for example a personal boundary that has been trampled.  We have all seen where such allies suddenly “join” the other side and immediately dump far right talking points about marginalized people they conveniently had in their brain ready to go, for such a time as their ass isn’t kissed to a sufficient degree.  These entitled time-bombs are accurately called Fake Allies, and can’t be trusted.

A society built on Puritan culture, as the USA is, takes great objection to any benefit seen as undeserved or not subject to hierarchy — what the far right call “the tragedy of the commons”.  Ayn Rand thought that the only charitable acts are done to make the “giving” party feel better about themselves, which is why such people harm those they claimed to help the moment they can’t feels superior about it.  We say: reject charity which is vertical, practice solidarity and mutual aid, which is horizontal.