The Resentful Worker and the Death Mother State

I recently came across a comment by Rupert Lowe, a figure often associated with right-wing conservative politics in the United Kingdom. Unexpectedly, I found myself agreeing with much of what he said. His remarks were not about immigration or the usual theatre of culture wars, but about work – the relentless, anxious, and precarious life of the small business owner. He spoke of a Parliament full of people who “don’t get it”, who have never run a business, never lived the 24-hour demands of self-employment. The description was familiar: endless red tape, taxation without understanding, and a state that feels more like a predator than a parent.

I do not share Lowe’s politics, but his tone – bitter, weary, and strangely proud – resonated. It is a tone heard increasingly across professions that depend on human labour rather than capital: clinicians, carers, teachers, therapists. It carries the exhaustion of those who feel unseen by the very systems they serve. What Lowe frames as class resentment may, at another level, be a collective cry for containment – a grief that the relationship between effort and recognition has broken down. This is not nostalgia for a simpler past, but an observation that reciprocity and belonging require living symbols, not only systems. When that life drains away, people of every political persuasion experience the loss as moral injury.

Material conditions form the backdrop against which psychic defences arise; depletion is economic as well as emotional. At the heart of this lament lies a psychological fracture between those who make and those who manage. The productive self identifies with embodied effort, responsibility, and risk. The managerial other becomes a repository for everything experienced as deadening, controlling, or parasitic. We see it in public life, where bureaucracy expands as vitality contracts; in healthcare, where forms multiply while meaning thins. This tension is not a matter of left or right, but of vitality and decay – whether the institutions that sustain us can still serve life rather than merely organise it.

This is more than social complaint. Psychically, it represents a defence against dependency and failure to thrive. To imagine the state as the enemy protects against the shame of needing its care. “They don’t understand” becomes a way of preserving pride when recognition has failed. The other – the bureaucrat, the official, the distant administrator – is made to carry the disowned feelings of fatigue, envy, and fear.

Projection is not itself pathological. It is a basic function of the mind, a way of sharing unbearable experience. It becomes destructive only when there is no container capable of receiving or transforming what is projected. Collapse occurs not because projection happens, but because the system has lost symbolic elasticity – the capacity to hold contradiction and aggression without splitting into heroes and villains. When the container hardens into moralism or rigidity, the projections rebound as blame and despair. A living system can metabolise attack; a dead one cannot.

This dynamic has become familiar to those working within public institutions. Many clinicians know what it is to labour under an apparatus that feeds on their effort but cannot nourish it. The fantasy that the people at the top are lazy or corrupt mirrors the fantasy that bureaucrats hold about frontline workers: that they are reckless, emotional, or resistant to reform. Each group idealises its own virtue and despises the other’s supposed inertia. The result is a closed circuit of resentment – an institutional version of the paranoid-schizoid position.

Where the business owner externalises the hostile parent in the form of the predatory state, the clinician often internalises it. The demand for moral purity replaces the wish for care. We work harder, reflect more, or campaign louder, as if virtue might repair the broken relationship. The bureaucratic superego becomes a voice inside the worker’s head – relentless, exacting, and incapable of satisfaction. The harder we try to prove our goodness, the further we drift from the living reciprocity that first gave our work meaning.

Stripped of ideology, Lowe’s complaint becomes a plea for recognition. Beneath his contempt for the “soft” state lies a longing for a parental function that can hold without devouring, protect without humiliating, and finally allow separation. It is a lament for the death of trust between worker and state, self and system. Such longing is easily captured by populist narratives that promise freedom while deepening isolation. Yet at its core, it expresses something universal: the wish for a form of governance that can contain rather than consume.

The state he describes resembles a psychic archetype known in analytic thought as the death mother. This figure is not simply the bad or withholding mother of infancy, who frustrates and disappoints. She represents a more radical collapse of care: the mind that unconsciously wishes the child gone, not from hatred but from depletion. What once nourished now poisons, and what once protected now consumes. The relationship becomes one of dependence without life, attachment without reciprocity.

Bureaucracy enacts this archetype with eerie precision. It offers forms instead of relationships, compliance instead of contact. It sustains itself by demanding endless proofs of good professional behaviour while giving little recognition in return. The citizen or worker remains attached because the alternative – total collapse – feels unthinkable. Within this structure, both the small business owner and the public servant become trapped in a double bind: unable to live without the system, yet deadened by its touch. Here, the “state” names not a single parent but the collective structures through which society holds its dependants. The point is not to condemn the state itself, but to question what happens when care becomes mechanical and loses its symbolic life. A living state, like a living parent, must be capable of thought, not merely control.

Two figures emerge from this matrix. The first is the resentful child who denounces the mother’s control and seeks freedom through rebellion. The second is the good daughter who stays loyal, working harder in the hope of redeeming the failed parent. Both are prisoners of the same fantasy. The rebel attacks the mother from without, the loyal child tries to heal her from within, but neither can bury her. The culture oscillates between these poles: outrage and obedience, protest and moral performance. What cannot be mourned is endlessly repeated.

To move beyond this impasse, the death mother must be laid to rest. Mourning is not destruction but recognition – the acceptance that something which once sustained us has lost its life. In institutional terms, this means releasing the fantasy that bureaucracy can provide moral containment, or that regulation alone can substitute for relationship. It requires the courage to face our dependence without idealising or demonising the container that once held it.

Group analysis offers a language for this transition. When the matrix – the shared field of meaning – collapses, words lose their vitality and projection replaces dialogue. The task of the group is not to assign blame but to restore symbolic communication, to re-establish a space where aggression and dependency can be thought about rather than acted out. In a well-held group, death is not denied but integrated; limits can be spoken and reparation becomes possible. The living mother is reborn not as an institution but as a relational process – a capacity within the group to metabolise pain into meaning.

This, perhaps, is the deeper work that Lowe’s lament points towards. His cry for freedom masks a desire for a living container, one that can hold complexity without collapse. The challenge is to rebuild forms of collective life that can bear ambivalence, that can recognise dependence without shame.

The moral economy of contemporary Britain exposes how far we have drifted from that possibility. Those who shoulder the visible labour of care, service, or small enterprise increasingly experience not gratitude but suspicion. The language of moral duty has hardened into coercion. We are told to give more, to work harder, to pay our share. Refusal is framed as selfishness; exhaustion as moral failure. This is what psychoanalysis calls moral sadism – the displacement of aggression into virtue. The righteous demand sacrifice from those already depleted: others need it more than you.

Behind this moral posturing lies a collapse of reciprocity. Data on taxation and labour distribution show that both the highest earners and the lowest are stretched beyond proportion, yet the discourse of blame persists. The point is not the numbers themselves but the affective pattern they reveal: the loss of a shared symbolic centre through which effort and reward could be linked. Without that centre, envy and guilt take over. Each class, profession, or identity group claims to suffer more, to give more, to deserve more.

While it may not be accurate to claim that taxes have never been higher in absolute terms, the feeling remains. The legitimacy of the complaint lies in how the burden is experienced. Small-business owners, professionals, and carers may understand “giving” not simply as paying tax but as giving their labour, their autonomy, and their recognition. The real question is how much any of us should be asked to give, and whether our systems assume taking rather than allow for meaningful choice. If the container no longer offers acknowledgement, then even modest demands for reciprocity may feel oppressive rather than just.

When containment fails at the parental level, the sibling field becomes charged with rivalry. Without a trusted authority to mediate, peers turn against each other in a struggle for moral legitimacy. We see this everywhere – in professional discourse, in activism, in the culture of social media. Each side claims compassion while projecting cruelty onto the other. Virtue becomes a competitive sport, empathy a means of control. The collective loses its capacity for intimacy.

What follows is a new kind of fatigue, not just of the body but of meaning itself. We perform community spirit while withdrawing from it. We speak of freedom yet censor ourselves. Institutions perform care but transmit lifelessness. The broad shoulders of society – carers, clinicians, farmers, teachers, small-business owners – once carried pride and belonging. Their work was visible, their contribution understood. Now charisma has turned to shame, and pride to exhaustion.

This transformation can be traced to an earlier historical wound. The modern welfare state, which figures like Lowe now condemn, was born from the trauma of war. It emerged from collective sacrifice and the longing for a benevolent parent who could protect against future catastrophe. That founding image – the good mother state – contained within it the seeds of its opposite. What began as reciprocal care hardened into administration. Policy replaced compassion, management replaced meaning. The symbolic mother that once promised renewal became the death mother, drained of life yet impossible to leave.

The grief for that loss runs through every sector that depends on care and service. It is not only an economic crisis but a psychological one. The worker’s resentment, the citizen’s cynicism, and the professional’s burnout all speak of a broken attachment. What was once a relation of mutual trust has become one of ambivalent dependence. We continue to feed the dead mother because her absence would expose our helplessness. To acknowledge this grief is not to idealise the post-war order, which excluded many, but to recognise the human need for continuity and reliability within systems of care. Renewal demands both remembrance and revision.

To live again, we must perform the ethics of burial. This means naming what has died without denying what still lives. It means recognising that no institution can carry the symbolic function indefinitely; it must be renewed through relationship, through speech, through the courage to confront conflict without expulsion. In psychoanalytic terms, mourning transforms persecution into thought. In social terms, it turns resentment into responsibility.

The question is whether we can build containers that are neither rigid nor sentimental, structures that allow difference without fragmentation. The group-analytic circle offers one image of how this might look: a setting where each voice can be heard without collapsing the whole. The circle is not hierarchy but dialogue, not compliance but conversation. Within it, aggression can be spoken, shame shared, vitality restored.

Our wider culture could learn from this. Public discourse has become dominated by sibling warfare – a perpetual contest for moral innocence. Each side accuses the other of cruelty while refusing to acknowledge its own dependence. Yet what we call independence is often a fantasy of omnipotence, and what we call care is frequently a plea for control. Until we can speak these contradictions, the social body remains split and unthinking.

Renewal begins with honesty about exhaustion. To name depletion is not weakness but truth. It is only when the group can admit its fatigue that it can begin to imagine rest. The move from vertical moralism – the voice that says “you should sacrifice” – to horizontal solidarity – the voice that says “we carry this together” – marks a shift from moral performance to ethical relationship.

Perhaps all the resentment and fatigue we hear today are signs of a culture in mourning. We live among the remnants of institutions that once held meaning but now function as ghosts. They still demand allegiance, but they no longer provide life. The task is not to resurrect them, nor to destroy them, but to learn how to live beyond them – to discover what forms of care and community can exist without the fantasy of omnipotent containment.

If there is hope, it lies not in reform or purity but in the slow work of restored relation: people speaking honestly within the limits of what can be borne, colleagues creating spaces where speech still breathes, groups willing to think together rather than accuse. It begins in the smallest acts of recognition – the moment someone listens instead of defending, the gesture that acknowledges fatigue without shame.

The resentful worker and the death mother state are not enemies but fragments of the same psychic field. Both grieve the loss of a relationship that once felt alive. To bury the death mother is to face that grief without turning it into hatred. From there, something new might begin: not a return to innocence, but the rediscovery of a living centre where work, care, and meaning can once again belong to one another. The task is neither revolutionary nor nostalgic; it is restorative. In tending what still breathes within our shared life, we conserve meaning itself.