Turning caring into a countable noun erases the human who performs it

Evidence

One of the best illustrations of the solidity of the myth of human interaction in public services is provided by the transformation in the health field of the word “care” from a verb to a noun. Politicians and administrators regularly discuss levels and amounts of care that will be provided, but rarely who will care, and how they will express their caring. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 538

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘care’ verb-to-noun shift is a compact, shareable linguistic observation about how institutions drain altruism of its agent.
• XREF: Parallels how impersonal-trust literature argues procedural norms substitute for substantive caring relationships. — connects to: Service agencies sustain an unfalsifiable myth of altruism that legitimizes care under bureaucratic limits — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 534; Categorical abstraction suspends the ethical rules of personal interaction; Total plasticity and recomposability evacuate narrative’s capacity to generate care — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 761 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Total plasticity and recomposability evacuate narrative’s capacity to generate care #expands (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 761
• Categorical abstraction suspends the ethical rules of personal interaction #expands (0.80)
• Categorizing at a broader level diffuses responsibility and lowers collective guilt #expands (0.80) — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 2117
• Defining people by one identity aspect fragments and weakens them #expands (0.75) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 512
• Words function as performative interpretations rather than nominal labels #expands (0.72)