The expression “deaths of despair,” once an exclusively scholarly term, became commonplace somewhere around 2019. It describes the heightened mortality among poor and working-class Americans from alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide. The problem is both class-based and distinctly American, and apparently mostly affects men. When it creased public awareness, “deaths of despair” were a disproportionately White phenomenon, though recent changes see it rising among Black Americans.
My post-college career has caromed from education to manufacturing, to construction, to marketing, and most recently, back to manufacturing. (FWIW, knowing how to do high-skilled professional work differs markedly from knowing how to find high-skilled professional work.) This rapid oscillation gives me a binocular perspective on the American economy. While the sources I consulted for this essay emphasized comorbidities like obesity, diet, and poverty, I suggest “deaths of despair” are caused by economic propaganda.
Working-class American men continue marinating in post-WWII messages emphasizing male self-sufficiency. Though most have accepted they’ll probably never again support a spouse and kids on a single paycheck, they continue hearing messaging that they should. This is especially true for younger working-class men raised on digital technology, as the phallocentric world of alt-right messaging fetishizes a Little House-ish strain of bucolic libertarianism that mostly only exists on TV anymore.
Ian Haney López notes that the White Americans most likely to oppose “welfare” and other forms of federalized help, are the White Americans most likely to need it. This happens, he writes, because “welfare” is racially coded in American political propaganda; Black people need help, White people should be self-reliant. This claim becomes somewhat flimsier with the recent rise in Black deaths of despair. So I don’t want to call Haney López wrong, but his position needs expanded.
In addition to race, federalized help is also coded criminally. Accepting government money is a form of stealing. Not corporate subsidies or PPP loans, certainly, which are necessary to maintain a well-oiled market, but any government money you’re eligible to receive is, essentially, picking the taxpayers’ pockets. That’s why thought leaders keep tying EBT to drug tests, criminal background checks, and other forms of screening to identify crimes. Because anybody who needs help is, a priori, a thief.
Therefore, whenever a worker reaches a point of destitution where it becomes necessary to start thinking about asking for help, it flips a moral switch. The demographic class raised up on mythology of friendly cops, law’n’order, and “just comply,” finds themselves asking: “Am I seriously committing a crime?” This trips them into the same guilt spiral healthy people experience whenever the intrusive thought of killing somebody appears. They feel compelled to stop the trajectory.
Unfortunately, the positions aren’t similar. When that intrusive “you could just strangle him” thought appears, we short-circuit the process by just not strangling him. The same simple solution doesn’t appear when the impoverished worker starts considering asking for help. Because even if they never actually request help, the poverty doesn’t just disappear. The conditions that made the request necessary linger, and the worker remains as incapable of bootstrapping as ever.
Please note, “crime” is something we do, but “criminal” is something we are. If you strangle somebody, the event has a clearly delineated beginning and end. But you never stop being a murderer, even after you serve your sentence. This becomes especially true when one’s crime isn’t a legal definition, but a moral category—think “crimes against humanity.” The crimes judged at Nuremberg didn’t transgress any written law, but Euro-American society’s definitions of human decency.
Social stigma leaves the criminal wearing an invisible scarlet letter. Unfortunately, in situations of moral judgement, that letter may be so invisible that only the person wearing it sees it. Have you ever seen working-class men asking their buddies for help? It’s almost impossible for most men to seek financial help without lowering their heads and shielding their faces. Yet their buddies, though perhaps not cash-flush, will cheerfully open their wallets to the extent possible. Because they don’t judge the seeker like the seeker judges himself.
American working-class men have internalized a message that seeking help, especially federalized help, is theft. Therefore, needing help equates to “criminality.” And what do we do with criminals? We judge and punish them. If a man’s friends, family, and community don’t punish him in the way he expects, he’ll punish himself, often with the vigor of a medieval flagellant. To prevent “deaths of despair,” we must stop racing after individual self-harm, and change the message working men receive and believe.
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