Published on 12, July, 2020
Why do so many people have a sense of entitlement?
I was discussing this with a friend at the weekend and we couldn't really get to the bottom of it, other than perhaps it's just been a slow erosion of society and work ethic.
They don't work, but are entitled to (net) taxpayers money, so they can have things that taxpayers can't afford, to live in areas that those taxpayers can't afford, to have holidays, to not work a job they don't want to, to be entitled to an easy and well paid job. That they have "rights" that must be treated as gospel, but not any responsibilities that are tied to those rights. That rules are just for "someone else", a whole attitude that everyone else owes them a living etc.
What is the flawed mental process where people decide that they are entitled to things just because they want them? How can anyone even attempt to justify that "want" means "entitled"?
The pampered society maybe that we now live in, perhaps? With free nhs health care, dentists, sickness benefits, social security benefits etc. I would say the attitudes that you are referring to started when the government started to spoon feed people.
It is not pampering if the money for the NHS comes out of taxes as it should. It is a sane way of catering for basic needs.
This isn't the palaeolithic age. The knowledge and technology could be used to make everyone's lives better. The Scandinavians gave managed it - and gone aalo g way to making the whole dreary stunting cycle of poverty a thing of the past. Why can't other countries?
Personally I would not equate basic needs with pampering or for that matter, spoon-feeding.
And actually the NHS cane into being not through any kind of altruism. It was because the UK had no army. Why was there no army? Because most men were then we're too sick to be part of it.
Of course we could always go back to the social darwinist model of the US. Stuck in a no-hope job? Got appendicitis? No money?
Then you die. Too bad.
That kind or argument could be made against anyone deemed to not be among the fittest of this lovely world.
I’m not making any argument. I was simply stating that you can trace this sense of entitlement back to the start of the national health service and the benefits system. I’m not saying this was right or wrong. My choice of words were very leading, I agree, I take them back. What I meant was, you can trace this attitude back to the start of the new nhs. It’s an observation. Not an argument. I was simply wondering if this ‘theory’ (for want of a better word) could be true? I don’t know. I don’t follow sociology/politics etc that closely.
That’s interesting. I’d like to visit that museum. I think that might be a little adventure for me this year. There’s a nice hotel I like to stay at in the Black Country. Cheers, it sounds very interesting.
A tour guide from the Black Country Living Museum told me that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the middle classes attended church primarily for religious and spiritual reasons. They didn't need the church as a force for discipline because they believed that they would be able to discipline themselves. In contrast, the working class folk considered church first and foremost as a force for discipline and morality with religion itself of secondary importance.
Therefore it could be possible that there was less social mobility and less of a sense of entitlement in the early 20th century because the poor and the working class folk were indoctrinated by church sermons that they are poor and working class because God wants them to be poor and working class. Therefore social mobility was a dirty word and anybody trying to climb the social ladder lived under fear that they were sinning so would pay dearly on the day of judgement.
The decline in Protestant Christianity in the post war decades resulted in society abandoning this restraining force and almost everybody wanting to better themselves one way or another.
What I am surprised about is that no one yet has drawn attention to advertising, which is definitely designed to create desire and therefore possibly a sense of entitlement. If the Joneses can have it why can't I?
I think what the NHS did for people, which they did pay for out of their taxes from their hard-earned salaries. Life expectancy increased and the majority of people stayed healthy for long.gercwhen they might otherwise have suffered or died earlier.
Again, who was it started the anti-welfare rhetoric? One word again - Thatcher. She was the one who referred to the welfare state as the nanny state. She used it as a verbal bludgeon to bully adherents of other ideologies, as every good social darwinism does. Investing in citizens becomes pandering to weakness, need demonized to become something parasitic. We all know where this kind of thinking may go.
I haven’t really looked into it so I have no idea really.
I'm inclined to think that the sense of entitlement increased in proportion with the decline of Protestant Christianity in Britain.