From friendliness to thanatology: Remarks on customer service and ideologies of personal care

Every phone call I make to customer service of any of the companies I have to deal with -- assuming I don't want to move to a desert reservation and go off the grid -- eats up hours of my time, with people who are usually not very helpful, and who are connected to, and operate as part of, systems that are designed with the profit of the company the sole real consideration, and just causes me a great deal of frustration. It can threaten my ability to do anything that is in any way productive or satisfying. If I were employed 40 hours a week in an office job at a company, in addition to the 10 or more hours a week spent in transportation, another 10 or more may need to be spent trying to solve some problem with some system failure or hiccup, in this extremely unproductive and energy-wasting manner. I do not get paid for this time, but it is work, and work that I must do.

Americans are rarely rational in their approach to problems. Instead, they are personal, or "friendly." Usually they want to feel like they're the boss. If as a customer you think you are, you might get the difficult treatment. Many people will not even answer a simple question I pose; they figure, they are asking the questions, they are in charge here. I suppose that the desperation with which people do this is because of the agonizing sense of powerlessness that I also feel when dealing with social institutions in this country at either a personal or technical level. Infotech systems are equally frustrating, though it is possible in principle to learn the system, so that you understand, for example, what is the code you have to use to say what you want in each instance, the word that the system's lexicon uses for that problem, or the number that you have to press, regardless of what the recording says. These systems are stupid (they are programmed by a person with a brain, but they themselves do not have an ability to respond very intelligently -- still), but you can at least figure them out.

If I did that, could I live my life, and have any time, let alone energy, to do anything I want to do? I find that the system I live under is not designed to allow me that. Most people are in either in the same boat, or they gave up long ago, maybe at the urging of their families, not long after they learned to speak.

Are they fortunate, those people who have never dreamed of any other way of living? That there are such people is pretty scary if you think about it for a moment.

The customer service people, who range in helpfulness from much to not at all (or worse: a negative helpfulness that increases the system dysfunctions and problems), are almost all very eager to remind me that they regard me as frustrated, and they understand and appreciate that. I wish they were less tolerant of my frustration and more interested in helping me with my actual problems. Most of those problems are not personal -- and so too they are not moral, "existential," religious or spiritual; they are not psychological; they are not problems with or about me, but problems that I may have but that are with and about things. And personalizing a business matter is a very insulting thing to do to a person, but it is almost part of our language. The possibility of this exploits a feature of the English language, which is that unlike the other European languages, it does not distinguish between polite and familiar forms of address. This makes it all the easier for people exercising a kind of power to try to make it a personal matter -- about you. I loathe people who do this.

It is what many women in our society do not understand, precisely because their 'formation' has left them mostly needing to be like mothers. If in doubt, it's personal; everything is personal; "the political is personal," which winds up meaning the opposite of what it meant as a feminist slogan: instead of making things considered private into contested matters of common concern (the political), all possibility of the latter is foreclosed from the outside.

But a care society (which might have a "feminist care ethics") is as much a thanatopolitical as a biopolitical one. You can't have one without the other. When life itself becomes a value, those who manage the actual lives measured by this value will be as concerned with managing their ending as well as their continuation. (Maybe that's why abortion is such a heated issue for everyone involved, because it seems to raise this kind of question, and in a way that, unfortunately perhaps, cannot be avoided.).

A human person's potentialities are not just those of a living animal body. Medical justice and the care ideologies tend to preserve our human rights only as animal rights.

My father complains that older people are often treated with an oppressive and impotentiating solicitude by younger people who just want to help them, no doubt motivated by endless Christian and maternal "love." (Is what we all need a company that loves us?). The extreme of this is that they can pack off and, at great expense that is of course billed to you, put you in some maximum care facility, where your only potentiality is to have your body cared for. You will be infantilized by nurses and people in similar jobs who are so caring, so solicitous, so compassionate and understanding, so determined to help you, so that they can feel like they are doing important work, and because you are put in a position where you are like a helpless child, and there does not exist any way of being otherwise.

I have even heard some people express suicidal thoughts because of their despair about this. The system is set up to take effective action against, if "on behalf of," such persons, but I wish they would instead be listened to. The system, which is organized for profit, is one in which many people have their lives destroyed or wasted. Like with the opioid epidemic.

Equally curious is that they can do this to adults in the prime of life and fully possessed of all their powers. They threatened to do this to me. I will never forget the lady social worker who made this threat. (Go ahead, accuse me of misogyny, you'll make my day, you idiot!). If you read between the lines, you could tell what I was being threatened with: To prevent me from being able to study and write, which is what I chose to dedicate my life to doing, in favor of caring for me "medically," as a presumptively sick or precarious body, whose mind and thinking are reducible to a state of the body that can be treated as a sickness. - My mind and its activities are central to the work I do, as well as what gives much of the substance and meaning to all my friendships, which were established and are maintained voluntarily, in each particular case, answering to no necessity. They were threatening to take that from me, because the police had decided to fear this, and they used the fact that I am a writer to target me as subject to their ability to deny me that.

It could be wonderful to deal with less of this infinite love idea.