But the attitude of “the divine right to be taken care of” is quite something else. It is one of the greatest blocks to the development of these persons toward maturity in therapy as well as in life in general. It is generally difficult for such people to see their demand to be taken care of as a problem to be analyzed and overcome, and they often react with hostility and a feeling of being “gypped” when their “right” is not honored. Of course they have been told, “God will take care of you,” from the early days when they sang the song in Sunday school to the present vulgarized form of the same idea in many movies. But on a deeper level, the demand to be taken care of—particularly since hostility arises so quickly when it is frustrated—is a function of something more profound. I believe it gets its dynamic from the fact that these persons have had to give up so much.
They have had to relinquish their power and their right to make moral judgments to their parents, and naturally the other half of the unwritten contract is that they then have a right to depend entirely on parental power and judgment, as a slave has a right to depend upon his master. So they are being gypped if the parent—or more likely the parental substitutes such as the therapist or God—does not extend them special care. They have been taught that happiness and success would follow their “being good,” the latter generally interpreted as being obedient. But being merely obedient, as we have shown above, undermines the development of an individual’s ethical awareness and inner strength.
By being obedient to external requirements over a long period of time, he loses his real powers of ethical, responsible choice. Strange as it sounds, then, the powers of these people to achieve goodness and the joy which goes with it are diminished. And since happiness is not the reward of virtue, as Spinoza remarked, but virtue itself, the person who surrenders his ethical autonomy has relinquished to the same degree his power to attain virtue and happiness. No wonder he feels resentful. We can see more concretely what these people have had to give up when we look at how the “obedience morality,” the emphasis on “being good by subordinating one’s self,” got its power in modern culture. It takes its modern form largely from patterns copied from the development of industrialism and capitalism in the last four centuries. Now the subordination of the person to mechanical uniformity, the arranging of one’s life to fit the requirements of work and parsimony, did bring financial and, as a result, social success during the major part of the modern period.
One could argue persuasively that salvation follows obedience, for if one was obedient to the demands of work in an industrial society, one tended to accumulate money. Anyone who has read of the business acumen of the early Quakers and Puritans, for example, knows how well these economic and moral attitudes worked together. The “Quaker dollar” was a concrete solace for the great resentment engendered in the middle classes because of the emotional privations they suffered in this obedience system. But times change, as we have indicated in earlier chapters, and in our day “early to bed and early to rise” may make a man healthy, but there is no guarantee that it will make him wealthy and wise.
Ben Franklin’s precepts, tithing and daily fidelity to routine work, no longer ensure success. The religious person, furthermore, particularly if he is a minister or otherwise engaged in professional religious work, has had to give up a realistic attitude toward money. He is not supposed to require that he be paid such and such a salary. In many religious circles it is considered “undignified” to talk about money, as if being paid, like toilet activities, is a necessary part of life but the ideal is to act as though it doesn’t really occur. Labor groups, adapting to the changing economic times of mass industry, have recognized that God does not send the pay check by raven’s mouth as food was sent to Elijah of old, and they have learned through their unions to bring pressure to bear to get adequate wages.
But people in religious professions cannot strike for higher wages. Instead the church is supposed to “take care of” the minister financially and otherwise; he is given discounts on the railroad and in department stores; tuition in seminaries is lower than in other graduate schools—all of which is not calculated to increase the minister’s self-respect or others’ respect for him in our particular society. The fact that the religious person is not supposed to take active steps to ensure his financial security is another evidence of the underlying assumption in our society that material security will somehow come automatically if one is “good,” an assumption closely connected with the belief that God will take care of you.
Thus it is easy to see why the person in our society who is taught to be good by subordinating himself, and only discovers sooner or later that he does not even get economic rewards for doing so, let alone happiness, should have so much resentment and anger. It is this buried resentment which gives the dynamic to the demand to be taken care of. It is as though the person were silently saying, “I was promised I would be taken care of if I was obedient: look how obedient I have been, so why am I not taken care of?”
The belief in “the divine right to be taken care of” often brings with it the feeling that one has a right to exercise power over others. That is to say, if one believes that persons should be under the power of others, he will not only submit himself to some more powerful person for the purpose of getting care, but he will feel it his “duty” to take care of—and to exercise power over—some person below him on the scale. This tendency is illustrated in its more sadistic form in the statement of one man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man with whom he lived even to the extent of taking the latter’s pay check every Saturday and putting him on an allowance, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?”
We shall not endeavor to explain the reasons for the fact that dominating and submissive tendencies go hand in hand, and that masochism is always the reverse side of sadism. Erich Fromm has classically discussed these points in his book Escape from Freedom. We wish only to point out that the person who demands to be taken care of is generally endeavoring in a variety of subtle ways to get power over others at the same time. Goethe well expresses this psychological truth: . . . for each, incompetent to rule His own internal self, is all too fain to sway His neighbor’s will, even as his haughty mind inclines.