Earlier this week, I was thinking about the “ACK!” that most of us have been feeling, in regard to Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal agencies. This ACK is closely related to the “why does some billionaire get to have all of our personal identifying information?” ACK and the “are those rallies really safe, or just an excuse for martial law?” ACK. The “uhh so does our president really want to put our own soldiers in harm’s way while giving two million Palestinians cause to be furious with us?” is more a “WHUT.” than an “ACK!.”

Why ACK? It comes down to Maslow’s Pyramid. Abraham Maslow realized that we need at least five categories of things to live and thrive. The most basic needs are things any living creature needs: food, water, whatever shelter or clothing the environment calls for, rest, etc. These are at the bottom of the pyramid, the base we need to build on for the rest. The further up the pyramid you go, the more we get away from the basics into things that can make life feel meaningful – connectedness to others, feelings of status and accomplishment, creative self-expression. Our need for safety and security appears near the bottom too, right above our basic physical needs, because it’s also fundamental to being able to do everything else.

One important aspect of security is feeling like the world works how we expect it to work – being able to have faith in our institutions. I will note that although we all need this, it is fundamentally a conservative need. Traditionally, conservatives become annoyed by programs to change how things work, for whatever good cause, because there’s a value to having things stay put.

But obviously we all need to be able to expect that our jobs, our retirement plans, our health care systems – pretty much ALL of our systems – will keep on happening and be there for us to rely on. This is a fundamental human need. Sometimes these things change, and when that has to happen, we want our society to go through some thoughtful and deliberate process so that we can all agree on the types of changes we want, and when possible, the pace that we want for making these changes.

So we now have our liberals and progressives going ACK! as Elon Musk starts dismantling these systems, while our supposed conservatives look the other way. Weird.

Two things seem to be going on. First, our Left is on average more educated than our Right. The Left may be far more aware than the Right that we actually need what these agencies do. We need our safe food, safe drugs, safe cars and trucks, clean water, clean air, safe air travel, safe roads, prompt tax refund checks, prompt social security checks, certainly better postal service than they’ve been giving us the past few years, and so on.

It’s ironic, too, because the Blue states have been underwriting these services for the Red States for quite some time now. Blue states pay more per person in taxes; Red states take more per person in services. On the other hand, as George Lakoff points out, conservative families traditionally teach values like deference and self-discipline, so they end up framing the use of services as weakness and failure, whereas liberal families traditionally teach values like empathy, so they end up framing the providing of services as kindness and community-building. Very broadly, we can say that Blue state people want to help the Red states because we’re all in it together, while Red state people don’t want to feel patronized; they’d rather be self-reliant.

And that brings us to the other big thing that’s going on. The federal government, and its agencies, employ some 2.3 million people to do all of these useful things. For many of us, these are just regular people, people like us, doing regular jobs. However, some on the Right have been conducting campaigns to influence the public into seeing these agencies not as “regular people going to work to carry out the activities that our Congress has decided it wants done” but as something Bad. This Bad thing can be vague and sinister, a “Deep State,” or something way too involved in our personal lives, a “Nanny State.” One way it’s threatening, the other way it’s infantilizing.

(Given all the work I’ve done on the type of language used to justify mass violence like genocide, I’ll have to note that these are the two ways most often used to characterize out-groups when we don’t want our people to see them as basically just like themselves. Either they’re potentially harmful, like demons or vermin, or they’re too helpless to take care of themselves, like Andrew Jackson referring to the Cherokees as “our red children.”)

So if the federal government and all of its vast array of programs is reduced to a single idea, it’s either threatening (“Deep State”) or too pushy for real adults and thus unwanted (“Nanny State”). Nobody points out that it’s only billionaires who can do for themselves what the federal government does for the rest of us. I certainly don’t have staff to grow all of my food for me in some vast unpolluted landscape over which I have complete control, let alone the ability to hire scientists to research and find cures for whatever illnesses I may eventually contract, and engineers to make sure all of the products I buy are safe. Billionaires can try for that, not me.

What’s the point of reducing the complexities of the government to a simple negative idea? It means our feelings about the government are likewise simple and negative. In other words, as my colleague Paul Slovic has described it, it creates an “affect heuristic” – an emotion-based shortcut that tells us what to do. If the government is a Deep State, we should oppose it, either by fighting it or by escaping from it. If the government is a Nanny State, we should fire it and reclaim our pride in ourselves. Those are the feelings and images that Trump, Musk, and MAGA are pushing at us.

But they’re wrong. That’s just propaganda, invented by people who don’t want to have to play by the rules that make things work for the rest of us. In reality, the federal government is our National Commons – it provides the structure and services we need to be able to do business with each other safely and easily across state lines. Highways and air travel, anyone? It’s also our Safety Net, giving us that vital layer of Maslow’s Pyramid that will catch us if we fall.

And unless we have the misfortune of dying young, we’ll all “fall” eventually. We need our Social Security, our Medicare, our cancer research, our veterans’ services, our consumer protection. And on a meta-level, we to be able to count on everything we’ve been taught to count on, so that we can have the peace of mind to take risks, like starting a small business or moving for a new job. If we are all hunkering down and waiting until the dust settles, then America can’t compete with the rest of the world.

With any luck, Elon Musk will lose interest in destroying our institutions once he’s finished with the ones that have been *ahem* investigating him and his iffy business practices. And with any luck, our Red state neighbors will remember soon that they actually need our National Commons and our Safety Net too, at least as much as the rest of us do.

Source for the Maslow’s Pyramid graphic: Wikipedia (By Androidmarsexpress – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93026655)