Gratitude is really hard.
Gratitude is really hard, specifically, because it requires you to subvert your own narrative of your existence. People have stories they tell themselves about who they are, about what their lives mean, and those stories usually focus on their own agency. You don’t often find someone who imagines himself as “the guy Superman rescues.” You don’t often find someone prepared to face the fact that he owes [whatever important thing] to someone else, someone with agency, swooping in to be compassionate.
Usually we just elide the facts, and let ourselves forget that there was a savior, because who wants that? And when we can’t elide the facts, it generates a dissonance that most often grows into resentment.
(You know who’s actually really good at gratitude, generally speaking? Artists. And it’s because the classic Artist narrative, at this juncture, actually does involve being rescued by a savior. “I was languishing in obscurity, but then Big-Name Mentor noticed me and encouraged me and hooked me up with the people who could jump-start my career.” That’s just how it goes! It’s expected, it’s understood, and it doesn’t make you any less of an Artist yourself. No reason not to own up to it.)
(Probably there are other lifepath-specific forms of gratitude that are similarly supported by existing social constructions.)
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If you want to be good to people because it’s the right thing to do, great, go to it. But if you’re trying to cultivate allies…you can’t just be good to them and expect them Respond Appropriately. You have to find a way to let them feel like heroes or something, not like victims or beneficiaries. Because they won’t let themselves be victims or beneficiaries. They will take your help and then find a way to forget that you helped. They will let themselves hate you, if that’s the only tool they have for saving face.
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MIND-KILLING POLITICAL ADDENDUM
I sort of wonder whether the modern version of social justice was engineered – by evolution or even by design – specifically to avoid this problem, at least in the short run.
The classic pattern on the left, at least in America, is that you have large groups of Oppressed Client People (minorities etc.) being led/managed by Well-Meaning Elite Liberal Saviors. And, classically, there’s a whole lot of tension there. The Oppressed People despise their elite defenders, mocking them and flouting their polite norms at every opportunity, always pushing past their ideology into something scarier and more radical. The elites feel hurt and betrayed by this in addition to being freaked out, and eventually there’s a split. (Richard Perlman, in Nixonland, describes the 1960s-1970s version of this dynamic really well.)
I feel like you don’t see that so much these days. Lots of intra-elite conflict, not so much direct conflict between liberal elites and their clients.
And…maybe this is because the elites have learned not to expect gratitude, or to ask for it? The SJ party line is pretty much: You are not a savior and can never be one. You are not a hero and can never be one. You have to give your all for the oppressed, but that’s nothing above-and-beyond-the-call, it’s just expiation of the Original Sin called “privilege.” This is the story of the oppressed people reclaiming their due, you are just a bit player, and when the victories are won they are the only ones who will deserve to be celebrated.
Leaving aside object-level questions of right and wrong, there are a lot of operational problems with that story. Certainly it’s likely to terrify, and disgust, well-meaning elites who might otherwise side with you. But I can imagine that it’s actually a really good way for a not-obviously-trustworthy elite to secure the loyalty of the oppressed people themselves, in a way that won’t be crushed by psychological defenses.