Friday 2 February 2007

Pic of the day: When small children take your generosity for granted, it is kind of cute. But when adults do it, not to mention entire organizations, that's another matter. (Screenshot from the anime Aishiteru ze baby.)

Entitlement and guilt

I believe that all of us bring with us from our pre-rational life these two feelings: Entitlement and guilt. It cannot be otherwise, because of our very biology. Unlike most mammals, we are born prematurely, every one of us. It takes a year before we can walk as well as a newborn calf or colt, and our other typical human activities talking and precision grasping also start around that time at best. Even after that, coming into our own life is a slow process. And it causes the feelings of entitlement and guilt.

ENTITLEMENT: As a baby, we only have to scream, and attempts are made to fill our needs. We are entitled to free food, comfort and positive attention, and we don't need to do anything to deserve it.

GUILT: But as time passes, screaming is no longer enough. On the contrary, it can lead to anger and denial of service! We must have done something wrong, since the Source of Goodness rejects us... but what? We still can't think logically, barely think at all, so it is quite hopeless to puzzle this out except by extensive trial and error. And even that is hard enough, because the Mother will react differently at different times of the year, month, week and even day, depending on outside factors we still have not the foggiest idea about.

When we finally are able to think rationally (not that all people get that far EVER), it is largely too late. Our personality has reached roughly the shape it is likely to have throughout life. Re-forming it is such an immense task, a human can not really be asked to undertake it, any more than you would perform surgery on yourself.

***

Now that we emerge with non-rational feelings of entitlement and guilt, there are different ways of dealing with it. Religion is one such way. In Christianity, God has graciously taken it upon himself to absolve us of BOTH guilt and entitlement. As anyone with a passing knowledge of this religion will notice, the recipient of God's grace is told flat out that he or she is undeserving. (In fact, mainstream Christianity has gone off the deep end here, I'd say, with ridiculous notions about how we deserve to be tortured in live fire for billions of years, to which any vaguely rational person would reply without much pause for thought, NO WAY IN HELL! Not being entitled to eternal life makes perfect sense, however.)

Once the supplicant for God's grace has fully realized that they are utterly non-deserving, however, their guilt is taken away. The judgment has already fallen, and not in their favor, but the punishment is taken from them. (I'll not deal with the theology in detail here, it is as usual different from the cartoon version.) The net result is that the person is BORN AGAIN. Not only are they offered a new start: A new start is REQUIRED. And while you were not working for your forgiveness the first time over, you are now expected to bear fruit that is worthy of your repentance... a new life without the old guilt and entitlement.

(Of course, many primitive societies have rituals of manhood and in some cases womanhood, in which you "lay off" your childish identity and take on a new, in some cases to the point of getting an entirely new name. Given the lesser efficacy of those societies, though, I won't spend more time on this.)

***

In contrast, several modern schools of thought try to preserve entitlement while displacing guilt. In what we on the philosophical right call "victimology", these schools of thought delineate a target group (women, ethnic minorities, age groups, sexual minorities etc) and declare that they are victims. It is implied that they are entitled somehow to better treatment than they receive, and that the lack of compliance from the greater society (which, if you think about it, consists mostly of other minorities with their own entitlements) ... this lack absolves them of guilt wherever and whenever they fail to make a positive impression on the world.

For an example, there has lately been much writing about how immigrants here in Norway (and doubtless other similar countries) are under- employed. They are the last to get a job, the first to become disabled, and on average paid less than their white and nerdy competitors. This is particularly true if they are named Muhammad, Abu, Hassan or variations thereof, but unusual skin color or names that are hard to pronounce are not predictors of successful career either. The obvious conclusion is that they are Victims, and as such entitled to reverse discrimination to level the playing field. This, as you may guess from my use of weasel words to set the tone, is of course wrong.

It is true that in real life, unlike the economy textbooks, the market actors are not necessarily rational and seeking only to maximize profit. But the beauty of a free market is that they don't all need to be. It is enough that there is one. Sooner or later some greedy and non-biased soul (perhaps an immigrant who has won the lotto) will notice that immigrants are easily available, work for less and do as good a job as their native counterparts. So this anonymous businessman starts hiring immigrants exclusively. This way he consistently runs a higher profit than his competitors, and his business grows and expands until it has hired all available immigrants, or the rest of society catches on.

To a limited extent, this has happened, in that certain businesses are staffed mainly by immigrants from the least employed cultures. (Taxi! Taxi!) But in the mainstream business world, familiarity with and compliance with local traditions seems to be worth more than victimologists believe. In some cases it may be a kind of hidden insurance payment, which would explain why the typical Muslim names count against you. Employers may think (or more likely just feel) that "OK, Hansen may not be as competent as Hussein, but at least he won't suddenly show up one day screaming Allahu Akbar and blowing up the entire office." (It does not matter whether Hassan was actually going to do that, of course. What matters is what people think or feel about the subject.)

The thing is that while you as a person may suffer injustice, your minority group as a whole does not, or the market would have ironed it out. This means that most likely someone in your group is treated better than they deserve, if you are treated worse. Ironically, the very group identity encouraged by victimologists "I am not a human, I am a woman / black / Muslim / queer" will reduce the chance for the individuals to get what they deserve.

I see from American debate how that nation has become bogged down in demands of entitlement from nearly every side. There are probably only a few thousand white British aristocrats lefts who are not entitled to preferential treatment now, out of 300 000 000 citizens. I don't think this is a shining example for the world, frankly. Rather, I'd advise them to grow up before it is too late and the country falls into utter ruin.

(And for what it's worth, I'm a lifetime single, belonging to a minority religion and using a minority language in my own country. So I think I am ENTITLED to an opinion, eh? But of course, I already said that we are all in a minority. Or at least the majority of us.)