My clearest lesson on entitlement came from a coworker in an earlier career. We traveled together for a work trip, and as we prepared to get on the flight she “expensed” a number of snacks, magazines, and a bottle of water for the trip. When I learned she planned to get the company’s reimbursement, I was a little confused and horrified.
Not saying I was without entitlement, though I might have claimed to be. I simply hadn’t encountered it in this way before. If it was for her own personal comfort and entertainment, to me it seemed separate from what the company should pay. Nor did I have a moral condemnation, I was simply worried about getting into trouble.
“Tony,” she explained. “When you act like you’re entitled to things, people let you have them.”
It was a revelation. On that trip, I didn’t go full out buying magazines and expensing them, but I did dare to get myself a martini with dinner that would go on the reimbursement receipt. And I didn’t get in trouble.
Entitlement is our sense of having a right to something, whether it’s legally conferred or a socially expected kind of treatment. At best, entitlement helps us walk through the world with confidence and a certain sense of safety. At worst, entitlement empowers us to act recklessly and harmfully toward those we consider less important.
As my coworker explained, when she acted entitled, people responded to confirm her sense of entitlement. If you’ve been alive in this culture for long enough you’ve likely seen or expressed the shadow of this—when that sense of entitlement is injured.
Not only is such disrespect discomfiting, people often seem to experience this as an assault of one’s sense of personal integrity and the natural order of the world. You are guaranteed to see self-righteousness, anger, and meltdowns. Entitlement and fragility walk together in the world. The person’s troubled sense of entitlement erupts in a display of child-like (meaning: big) emotion that causes so much discomfort to those around them that often others will simply cave in and try to tend and soothe that person’s distress. It’s an emotionally centered, mature person who is able to self-regulate and stay grounded during another person’s entitled acting out.
Power influences this, of course. If the entitled person has wealth, influence, or other forms of power, then the urge to soothe and placate them increases, with the risk of other costs if they are allowed to be unhappy. Without that power, the wounded sense of entitlement is more likely to be ignored, criticized, or punished. “Who do you think you are?” It festers, becoming self-righteousness, envy, jealousy, spite, or deep rage and powerlessness.
The worldview that frames and supports one’s sense of entitlement, or lack thereof, also informs one’s ideas of justice. Those who grow up believing they would be given a high-paying career by doing well in school, who then graduate with severe student debt and a minimum wage job, would have a wounded sense of entitlement. The world didn’t work the way it was supposed to, either the worldview was wrong or someone is to blame.
Other people might grow up believing that, as a member of a marginalized group, their hard work will not necessarily be rewarded and it’s not their fault. That person might graduate with the same situation and experience their own anger and hurt about it, but lack that explosively violent sense of outrage. They were prepared to live in this kind of world.
Self-righteousness, envy, jealousy, and rage are bright fires that eat up attention and energy. Even coming from a place of entitlement, they are personally disempowering. They focus our awareness on perceived slights and wrongdoings, on an overwhelming sense of “wrongness” outside of us that needs to be rectified and will not.
Most folks who’ve dated long enough have at least one ex that hurt them deeply, who still goes about life dating other people and having friends. Depending on our sense of entitlement and justice, this is infuriating. How can people like them when they’re so obviously a piece of shit? How can they be happy when I’m stuck with all my anger and woundedness over their behavior? How is this fair?
The aggrieved sense of entitlement comes from a place of genuine pain that needs grieving, feeling, and healing, but self-righteousness will not allow us to go there. It will instead fixate on the outer problem, blaming the perpetrator and blaming the deity or society that somehow set up this dilemma. If that self-righteousness continues to deepen and fester, perhaps fed by people around us or ideological terrorists finding this opportunity to exploit that naïve sense of unfairness, then it makes sense that someone would act out with violence or bullying.
What is intriguing is that self-righteousness often comes with a sense of rejection and refusal. People too identified with it often seem unable or unwilling to sink into acceptance and grieve the pain they’ve experienced. It is in this grief that they will find healing, release, and true freedom.
But in so grieving, they also experience a sense of defeat. The defeat is, perhaps, that their worldview was incorrect, or that they too played a role in the harm done, or that simply they live in a world where people can hurt each other and not always receive the punishment they expect. Without that grief, however, the self-righteousness and outrage are like marionette strings bound to our emotional systems.
Recently I found myself spending far too long reading the comment sections of particular Internet articles, working myself into a fuming anger about a particular person’s apparent unwillingness to be accountable for their actions, and all the ways their supporters dismissed and ridiculed the charges brought against the person.
After a while, I had to ask myself what good I was doing. I had no way to control these people or stop these dismissals and denials from happening. I was simply gorging myself on more anger and toxicity and letting myself become reactive—a reactivity that would undermine my ability to engage. All I could do was speak my truth from my perspective, and move on. Either people would listen, or they would not.
Anger, justice, and even entitlement are not intrinsically bad qualities, but they do become toxic when partnered with righteousness and blame. Expressing anger about harm done, holding people accountable for their words and actions, and insisting on a certain kind of treatment are necessary components to healthy relationships. There comes a point when I have to acknowledge that my efforts are failing, or hurting me more than bringing healing to the relationship. Working this wound means both feeling the pain of it and working through the spiritual implications of it.
“Spiritual implications” have much to do with beliefs about the cosmos and human purpose within it, even for those who do not think much about such matters. Even atheists in modes of self-righteousness or self-blame will make comments about how life “should be” or how things are “supposed to go,” as though there is an external authority who is intentionally organizing and influencing the world and has deliberately targeted them for harm. This does not disprove the person’s atheism. It seems, to me, a psychological artifact of an earlier stage in our development that we all need to face at some point. Our early experiences of infancy and childhood, when we did have caregivers who appeared to be organizing and influencing the world with personal attention to us, shape this view of the world.
In several pre-Christian societies, one could petition a god for help, and if the god failed to follow through on their end of the bargain, punish the god by refusing further devotions or burying their statues head-first in the ground. That is a deeply personal relationship to a god, an ego-to-ego relationship.
Some threads of monotheistic thinking shifts the dominant theology to a different framework, in which there is an omnipotent deity that is simultaneously concerned for our lives and remotely organizing the world according to a mysterious plan. Depending on one’s level of development and spiritual community, personal affronts are due to either you or someone else failing to adhere to the deity’s needs and expectations. Or they are simply signs that one must take responsibility for living the deity’s energies—that justice does not come from without, but rather comes from us behaving in a just way.
A related theological framework is something along the lines of us living in a nihilistic, meaningless world, yet also being surrounded and interpenetrated by a world of spiritual meaning and purpose. In this framework, it is the role of consciousness to bring that purpose and meaning into this empty world. Expecting the world to behave according to that purpose and meaning is a recipe for failure. Resenting the world for failing to live according to my dictates of justice only interferes with my work of becoming more spiritually connected and being a conduit of justice.
Yet another framework might be that everyone and everything is a facet of a grander divine being, that our personal struggles are no more or less favored that the struggle of the bacterium to survive its infestation of our bodies. We term that struggle an illness, because we prefer our own survival, but the bacteria may have their own gods they petition for favor, their own sense of entitlement to inhabit and hijack the functions of our bodies. In a sense, it is a world so filled with meaning that it is functionally indistinguishable from the other frameworks that do not rely on an omnipotent and personally invested god. We’re still essentially on our own, trying to survive and express our highest potential, perhaps with the help of some very strong allies.
What so many religious and spiritual traditions seem to offer is the insight that we have a veil between our experience and reality. H. P. Blavatsky, the esoteric founder of the Theosophical Society, said that, “The mind is the great slayer of the real.” In this aphorism, which is the contents of the mind—our thoughts, biases, analyses—are in some way actively opposed to our experience of truth and reality. Christian thought speaks of us living in a “fallen” world, divorced from its divine origins—or it may be that humans ourselves have fallen out of alignment with its innate divinity. Buddhist meditation practice trains the being to see past the veils of illusion.
In a sense, we do live in a constructed hallucination. Our brains automatically complete sentences, even with incomplete information—so successfully that at times we may receive only the information we expect to hear, and fail to understand or take in information that is unexpected. The structures of thought that shape our experience of life extend into the realms of behavior and social interaction.
In a sense, our brains create structures of order and predictability and attempt to impose them upon a world that does not have any obligation to live according to our beliefs about how things should be. This incongruity creates an ongoing friction and tension as we attempt to reconcile, integrate, or reject experiences that do not fit our worldview—a first order change, trying to keep up the structure in spite of evidence. A second order change—reconstructing the structure entirely—is much more costly and disorienting.
I see people in Recovery groups whose constant efforts to control, manage, and force life to happen according to their own expectations contribute to their painful and overwhelming feelings of self-righteous anger and addictive behavior. In the 12-Step community, surrender to a more powerful being is a step toward healing and recovery—connecting to a worldview in which we will be cared for and don’t need to control and manage everything is what brings liberation.
People who believe in one, many, or no gods may feel themselves equally to be at the mercy of larger powers outside of themselves, to whom they must entreat for beneficence or placate to avoid malevolence. At other stages of development, they may come to find more refined senses of nuance, justice, and causality. There are certainly Christians out in the word who believe their God has a very personal and precise influence in the world, rewarding and lifting up the righteous while condemning and punishing the unrighteous, even though one of their foundational texts reminds them that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).
Feeling entitled encourages us to advocate for ourselves, take up space, stand tall, be our fullest and loudest selves. Feeling entitled supports us in not allowing others to step on us, to dismiss or disrespect us, to use us for their gain or self-satisfaction. Entitlement also encourages us to accept, justify, and defend unequal treatment that benefits ourselves even when it hurts others. It discourages us from acceptance of difficult truths about life, which would allow for greater creativity and responsivity. It interferes with having open-hearted relationships with others, and it may disempower us into thinking that someone else’s gain is our own loss.
To grow out of our entitlement, both the way it limits us and the damages it causes, we must be thrust into a world that does not have a personal investment in our wellbeing. We must accept the possibility that this universe is not designed for us, but rather we are in a collaborative relationship together, and that we are surrounded by other agents that could help or harm us, and we may not know which. In this world, we may experience intense distress and want to be saved, or want to hurt and punish others for our own pain, but that is a false and destructive path. What we need is courage, containment, and help in meeting our distress and learning to tolerate and transform it.
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