Arlie Russell Hochschild

[...] the “psychological program” involved the belief that there was a terrible choice between jobs and clean water or air. But how many jobs depended on oil? And was it either-or? Before I understood government, maybe I had to understand the private sector. Maybe there were tough choices I didn’t see.

In all the talk at the gatherings for Congressmen Boustany and Landry and around the table at the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to—to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution. [...] “Part of the psychological program is that people think they’re free when they’re not,” he said. “A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren’t free to swim.”

I ask myself, again, how people in a poor state with the worst health in the nation can look askance at a federal government that provides 44 percent of its state budget, and how such a polluted state can take a dim view of government regulation of polluters. A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about. I was backing into the picture I wanted to see by noticing what wasn’t in it. It was like trying to understand a photograph by studying the negative. I found myself focusing not on what people remembered, focused on, and said, but on what they forgot, disregarded, and did not say. I was backing into the deep story, as I am calling it, and noticing what, in human consciousness, it crowded out.

As I take leave of the Arenos, I ask them about the lawsuit they have filed against the polluters of Bayou d’Inde. Fifty-three plaintiffs, residents on the bayou and workers in nearby companies, had sued twenty-two companies. “We’re still waiting,” Harold answers. Nothing could fully make up for the loss of trees, birds, and fish from their beloved bayou, but the Arenos are hoping mightily that the lawsuit will at least provide money to move, for despite their attachment to the place, their distrust of the water, the banks, the air makes them feel like refugees in their own home. If they win the suit, it will be a moral victory, a remembered fact. A lawyer who worked in the firm that filed their suit (the lead lawyer had passed away) tells me with a sigh that it is common corporate strategy, with the cooperation of the state agencies, to string these lawsuits out for so long that plaintiffs die before money is due. Still, much time has passed.

[...] the British anthropologist Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard called it when studying something utterly different. Evans-Pritchard had been researching a pastoral people of the Sudan called the Nuer, who had a remarkable memory for some things and completely forgot about others. Men and women both remembered eleven generations of male ancestors, for example, but largely forgot their female counterparts. There was, the anthropologist sensed, a structure to what they remembered and forgot that was based on the power of the Nuer’s dominant institution[...]. Dominant within that system were men. So memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power. The Arenos faced structural amnesia about something else and linked to a different source of power: the Louisiana Chemical Association, the Society of the Plastics Industry, the Vinyl Institute, Shell Oil, PPG Industries, and their leaders in government. Spokesmen for this source of power drew the popular imagination to the exciting economic future. The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten, like the female half of the Nuer.

“The Sabine River is a public river,” Paul Ringo told me on a visit I paid him, “But if you can’t drink in the river, and you can’t swim in the river, or fish in the river, or baptize your young in the river, then it’s not your river. It’s the paper mill’s river.”

The Greek word “nostalgia” derives from the root nostros, meaning “return home,” and algia, meaning “longing.” Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. [...] the Spanish mal de corazon. Many who have suffered from this illness of heart have been forced to leave a beloved home that is itself still there. But Harold and Annette Areno live at home in an environment no longer there.

Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes—through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor, as we shall see. Lee’s biggest beef was taxes. They went to the wrong people—especially welfare beneficiaries who “lazed around days and partied at night” and government workers in cushy jobs. He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn’t want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for. He had his own more local—and personal—way of showing sympathy for the poor.

Lorsque nous cherchons à "être en contact avec nos sentiments", nous les rendons davantage sujets au contrôle et à la manipulation, plus réactifs à diverses formes de gestion.

Comme l'a dit la linguiste Robin Lakoff, les livres de thérapie sont au XXe siècle ce que les livres d'étiquette et de savoir-vivre étaient au XIXe siècle. Cela tient au fait que l'étiquette elle-même a pénétré plus profondément dans la vie émotionnelle.

Il s'agissait d'une plaisanterie sur l'éloignement vis-à-vis de soi, d'une protestation poignante venue des coulisses à l'adresse de la logique marchande standardisant et dévalorisant la dignité des femmes.

Freud dénichait généralement des histoires sexuelles sous les histoires sociales, mais il existe également des histoires sociales sous les histoires sexuelles. L'histoire sociale concerne ici des jeunes femmes qui veulent plaire (et qui travaillent pour des entreprises qui tirent profit de cette caractéristique) tout en voulant garder une part d'elles-mêmes indépendante de ce désir de plaire. Leurs problèmes sexuels pourraient être considérés comme une forme prépolitique de protestation contre l'écartèlement et l'usage excessifs de leur féminité traditionnelle.

La supposée "plus grande tolérance des femmes envers les abus" se traduit par une exposition plus importante à ces abus, combinée à un moindre stock de "munitions" à utiliser contre eux (dans cette monnaie que représente le respect).

Les sentiments ne font pas irruption spontanément ou automatiquement, que ce soit dans le jeu en profondeur ou dans le jeu en surface. Dans les deux cas, l'auteur a appris à intervenir sur son émotion, soit en la façonnant de toutes pièces, soit en en modelant l'apparence.

En gérant nos sentiments, nous contribuons en fait à leur création.

C'est lorsque nous éprouvons des sentiments que nous découvrons notre propre point de vue sur le monde.

Marx, et beaucoup d'autres, nous ont raconté l'histoire de l'ouvrier ; c'est celle de l'hôtesse qui m'intéresse, car je souhaite mettre en évidence et faire reconnaître les coûts associés à son travail. Et je veux que cette reconnaissance découle de la démonstration préalable de ce qui peut arriver à chacun d'entre nous lorsque nous sommes séparés de nos sentiments et de leur gestion.

L'hôtesse de l'air et l'agent de recouvrement représentent deux extrêmes de la demande professionnelle en termes de sentiments.

Ces sourires étaient considérés comme une extension du maquillage, de l'uniforme, de la musique d'ambiance, des couleurs pastel apaisantes et des cocktails, toutes choses qui permettaient aux passagers d'être satisfaits.

Lorsque ce sont les individus que l'on essaie de transformer, le produit final est un état d'esprit.