Crabs in a pot

The image is borrowed and the point of it is what a group does to whoever tries to leave. Marsh sets it beside tall poppy syndrome, which she defines as the fear, impulse or act of attacking a person who visibly excels above their peers, and treats both as expressions of something more general, an impulse to even out advantage that appears in many or most cultures wherever inequality is perceived. That impulse is not simply malice, and this is where her treatment differs from the usual one. The same egalitarian tendency, aimed at a structure rather than a person, is the centrifugal force she counts as healthy, the pressure that works against ponzi schemes of celebrity, wealth and power. Crabs in a pot names what happens when it is aimed at a person instead. Those perceived to be unfairly advantaged are strongly or forcibly encouraged to make restitution, and the same attitude appears even towards advantages that can be neither helped nor shared. The container is the other half of the image. One crab escapes easily, and what changes is not the crab but the presence of the others, which makes this a claim about conditions rather than about character.

Crab mentality is a common expression in the Philippines, where it names a specific social vice, and it circulates widely in Caribbean, African American and diaspora usage. Tall poppy syndrome does the same work in Australia and New Zealand, and Scandinavian societies have the Law of Jante. In every case the phrase is used as a reproach against the pullers. Anthropology and economics have studied the same behaviour more neutrally as levelling mechanisms in egalitarian societies, and behavioural experiments record costly punishment of high earners in public goods games. Marsh keeps the reproach but supplies the missing half, since she treats the levelling impulse itself as healthy and locates the fault in its being turned on an individual rather than on the structure producing the inequality.