Why Are We Always Being Told to "Be Grateful?"

It is the conventional view that the feeling and expression of gratitude--of thankfulness--is a great virtue, and its lack a great failing, with, indeed, that conventional view taking the matter to extremes, with those who may really have little to be grateful for enjoined to be grateful for that.

But is that what this is really about?

As it happens, there are reasons to be skeptical of the virtue of gratitude.

After all, gratitude is felt by a person in relation to a benefactor. Of course, anyone can do anyone else a good turn, but society being the unequal thing it is, the relationship is commonly a hierarchical one, with those feeling gratitude expected to humbly bow their heads before the more powerful betters who have bestowed on them not what is theirs by right, but a gift, charity out of "the goodness of their hearts."

In that bit of incoherence (the expectation of humble bowing from others hardly speaks to any goodness on an individual's part!) lies the secret of the vehemence of society's enjoinment to gratitude--the call on the ruled to expect little, and be deferential to those who allow them that little, the low keeping their places contentedly, all very conveniently from the standpoint of those on top.

Naturally it is the opposite in an egalitarian society, such of them as we are able to find, as there are no superiors and no inferiors, and a different order of relations prevailing, to go by what Peter Freuchen reported from his time among the Inuit. Expressing thanks when a hunter more successful than himself gave him a rather large quantity of meat, the hunter "objected" that humans "help each other" with no thanks necessary or even desirable, for just as "by whips one makes dogs," "by gifts one makes slaves."

Of course, making slaves is something the rich and powerful have always approved, as much today as ever, with all this confirmed by the way the rich expect infinite gratitude from the public towards the Atlas they believe themselves to be, while recognizing no obligation to be grateful themselves as, sitting on their G-6 flying to Davos, they whine that they have not nearly enough, for the world never gave them their due, with their courtiers in the press and the web fora ever ready to weep bitter tears at their plight.