Who is more deserving
As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life!
Over on Sluggish, Jesse Meadows is talking about people getting ruffled “ because everyone online is autistic now.” It’s just the latest hand-wringing over autism as an internet trend (or insert any “-ism as an internet trend”), and the key argument is that the right people aren’t getting what they deserve, while “fakers” are taking resources away.
And there’s that word, the one that crops up all the time in a world defined by scarcity.
Deserve. Some deserve, some don’t. What could be common ground becomes a fight for resources, rejecting people with varying levels of need because of the belief that there isn’t enough to go around.
bell hooks calls it “the capitalist notion of well-being,” the belief that the good life can only be had by a few. Meadows cites the book Health Communism, tracing the deserving/non-deserving binary back to the early days of English Poor Laws, which had to source the “surplus population” (look at that language already) into increasingly marginal, verifiable categories. Some citizens were “deserving,” while others were treated as waste, a strain on the productive (taxpaying) community who were the real sovereign citizens.
The worker is told to beware of the degenerate influence of the surplus population and to root out those who would fraudulently claim state or private benefits as surplus; we are deputized by the state to surveil and judge others’ worthiness for aid. (Health Communism)
(Note: big overlap with religion too! Hence the theology of capitalism.)
What can we do? Stop believing the myth of scarcity. Reject this limited, binary framing. Recognize our solidarity. Refuse to be pitted against each other. Tell different stories.