So the other day I observed that cleaning brings out the inner statist in people.
It's not by accident that this happens, and I want to elaborate a little.
And I'll give one more anecdote:
Once I lived with this guy who created a chores rotation for the house. Fair enough, sort of. Except I started spending less and less time at the house, to the point of basically not ever using dishes. (So doing everyone's dishes 1 week out of 4 became really annoying, not to mention that I was generally cleaning much more than using.) And he wasn't willing to tweak the system into something more reasonable.
(The person who owned the house, who also lived with us, was essentially on my side and basically gave me the green light to slack, but he didn't want to deal with talking this guy off of the system.)
Eventually there came a point where I actually just wasn't home for a couple days, and the dishes piled up (and it didn't seem like a reasonable thought that I should drop what I was doing in case people at home cooked a 5-course meal), and all hell broke loose and I was the mortal enemy of his. Because of household tasks.
(Some people are legitimately neat freaks, but that doesn't mean they get hot and bothered over it or behave irrationally. They're not who I'm talking about.)
What's important to these people is the system itself and having this sense of control.
They're not consciously aware of it, but that's actually what's driving them.
Because you always need an excuse, right?
If you tried to say "alright folks-- bedtime is gonna be at 8pm, we're all gonna eat tuna fish, and nobody showers on Wednesday", then everyone thinks you're a weirdo and they don't listen.
But chores are the avenue where you can get away with it. People won't disagree or question any underlying imbalances, because they don't want to be perceived as not wanting the clean house.
So to whatever extent someone has a tendency to be statist (to want to control and steer the behavior of other people), chores and cleaning are going to be naturally attractive to them. So they'll develop an interest in this.
It's basically like the microcosm version of "help the poor" or "save the planet". They don't actually care about these things. They care about their power mechanism, and these are the justifications for it that work best.
So in other words, it isn't that being weird and bossy is the means to an end goal of having a clean house -- it is the end goal, and the clean house is their way of rationalizing it.
wagon/horse
