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.
Debatable. Public services are one thing but claiming large amounts of benefits over a prolonged period is another thing. The benefits are the grievance of the OP.
The NHS has become a national religion although large amounts of resources are spent on all sorts of undesirable things like people who have totally left their health to rot. Part of the problem is the NHS emphasis on cure rather than prevention. This may have been a good strategy in the 1940s but it no longer is today.
With education it created a faction of society (which still exists today) that refuses to take responsibility for their children's education or pay money for educational resources because they believe that the state should provide it all. There was a big fiasco at my mother's secondary school over safety glasses for chemistry lessons.
I have thought that a better solution to cutting benefits it to require people unemployed for more than a few months to home educate their children.
When free health care was first introduced, including free spectacles, the serivice was inundated with people wanting free spectacles and free health care. As health care has grown and has got better (for want of a better word) expectations have got higher. People go to see their gp’s for all sorts of crazy things nowadays. You’re right, it’s like a national religion. Instead of going to mass to get rid of their sins, they go to the doctors.
It’s been enjoyable reading all your comments. Thank you.
That wouldn't surprise me at all. Inbuilt obselescence keeps on track g our disposable things and keeps is slavishly spending and if that is possible then why not create deliberate stagnation too. A modern, inexpensive design for spectacles that is more flattering too should not be an impossibility now.
Public services have to move with the times and changing consumer demands. The latest and greatest designer specs might be asking too much of the NHS but should customers in the 1980s really have to make do with frames unchanged since the 1940s?
This is cynical but it's plausible that deliberate stagnation is a cunning way for politicians to kill public services.