Making Sense of Lazy Freeloader, Anti-Welfare Rhetoric

In 2012, as candidate for vice president, Paul Ryan talked a lot about people in our country who were makers and people who were takers. Ryan argued that there were people, makers, who contributed something of worth to our society, and there were other people, takers, who just sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed the fruits of the makers' labor.

For a looooong time, the idea of the freeloader has been employed to encourage people to vote against anything resembling a welfare state. In its racist form, black, indigenous, people of color, and religious minorities have often been cast as the problematic freeloaders. In its fascist and genocidal form, the logic is extended to injuring the reproductive abilities of those people and exterminating them on the basis of encouraging people to view them as parasites to the nation.

As a real phenomenon in the world, we are right to be wary of freeloading. Forager societies long considered freeloading to be a lethal threat to the group, particularly in times of shortage. Anthropologists tell us that these hunter gatherer groups, possibly for hundreds of thousands of years, practiced fierce egalitarianism, in which those caught hoarding more than their share or avoiding work were subject to group ridicule, ostracism, and even execution. In many situations these groups encountered, individual freeloading could have meant the demise of the entire group.

The questions are: 1) why does freeloading occur, and 2) where do we currently see its true lethal form in society? I would argue that freeloading is actually extremely rare under socially healthy conditions. When individuals know and trust the people they're working with, and they believe the task they're working toward has value, the overwhelming majority of people participate happily and willingly because human beings are called, at a very deep level, toward belonging and meaning.

When, on the other hand, people don't trust or know the people in their group, or they don't trust whatever endeavor their group tells them they're supposed to be working toward, the incidence of freeloading behavior rises significantly. It's far easier to rationalize taking from people or institutions you don't know or trust.

In other words, widespread freeloading behavior is a symptom of a society in which there is a lack of trust and sense of belonging. We're not born freeloaders; we learn to freeload.

This means that anti-freeloader rhetoric that divides citizens into two groups, such as casting citizens as makers or takers, actually works to exacerbate the root cause of freeloading in two ways. First, it often encourages people to rely on racial and cultural stereotypes in determining who's trustworthy. Second, it seeks to deny social support services to people who need them in order to attain the stability they to be able to contribute to society (which is all of us at some point in our lives). In both ways, this divisive rhetoric actually increases the likelihood of freeloading - the opposite of what it is supposedly fighting against.

But there's one other thing about this rhetoric that's important to understand. It serves as a deflector shield for the most lethal type of freeloading we have both in the US and globally: that of financial elites.

Freeloading does happen among people on the margins of society, but this type of freeloading doesn't even come close to the type encouraged by a pathological meritocracy myth that suggests that it's reasonable for the richest eight people in the world (all men) to own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity, as was reported in the New York Times In 2017.

We have adapted an appropriate sort of anger and disgust response to those who reap rewards they don't deserve and, in the process, put the rest of the group in danger.

The biggest problem with lazy freeloader, anti-welfare rhetoric is not that freeloading isn't a serious and lethal threat to humanity, it's that it encourages us to locate the root of the problem in the wrong places, and when we do, we actually make the problem worse.

Lazy freeloader, anti-welfare rhetoric is not language intended to communicate reality in a way that helps us become a better, healthier society. It's propaganda.

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