On the Word "Entitlement"

As James Cairns observes in his recent book The Myth of the Age of Entitlement, the term "entitlement" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a legal right or just claim to do, receive or possess something"--and this is its usual, conventional meaning. However, as he also points out, psychologists' different use of the word equates it with false claims to such rights and claims, reflective of narcissism--extreme selfishness and grandiose views of oneself to which they expect others to pander. "You are acting very entitled" one might chide another individual they think needs a "reality check" and a "privilege check"; someone who needs to "get over themselves"; someone they think needs to be brought "down from the clouds," and "welcomed" back "to the REAL world" (awful, awful phrase, which will probably one day get its own post here).

The second usage is not a description of a matter of fact, but an accusation. And that second, accusatory usage would seem to raise the danger of turning the first usage, any usage, into such an accusation; of turning a mere report or acknowledgment of legal rights or just claims into a way of undermining or denying such rights and claims by declaring the claimant of an entitlement to be a selfish, deluded narcissist. Moreover, given the way in which society misuses and abuses the language of "moralistic" scolding to legitimate inequality and injustice and worse (evident in the manner in which people use the word "deserve"), it would seem in danger of systematically misusing and abusing the word in exactly this way.

And indeed, that is exactly what has happened.

Consider how we in the United States refer to our social safety net--to the Social Security that provides a measure of protection to the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled. This are all other such programs are consistently called "entitlements" in common usage, and the double-meaning is all too evident. They are undeniably legal rights to those for whom they are intended. Sane people would recognize that they are a just claim as well--not only because society is obligated to provide for its most vulnerable members, but because everyone pays into the system in the expectation that if and when they need this program, it will be there for them.

However, from the very start a significant and influential swath of opinion has been fiercely opposed to the existence of any such program, and even the principle of mutual aid underlying it--begrudging the contributions they make, and even the idea that human beings have any obligations to each other (with the frothing-at-the-mouth meanness-wrapped-in-pseudointellectualism of the Ayn Rand-loving "libertarians" who befoul the Internet and every other public space only the most blatant such expression).

Of course, this swath of opinion has only grown more vocal and influential as the country has continued its rightward march from the 1970s to the present. And this, too, is at least as evident in every usage of the word "entitlement" in reference to a program like Social Security. In fact, the attitude, and the usage, have progressed so far that ostensible progessives use the word "entitlement" to beat down working class discontent with the erosion of their social protections, wages, benefits and prospects in the neoliberal era--as New York Times film critic A.O. Scott so shamefully does in his review of 2016's Manchester by the Sea (in which he "accuses" figures like the film's protagonist Lee Chandler with a sense of entitlement as "white working men" to a "working man's paradise").

What is as notable as such usages of the word "entitlement" is the ways in which the word is not used. Working class people, especially working class people whose ethnic background makes it clear that they are disadvantaged by class and not race in a society and a discourse neurotically hostile to acknowledging class at all, are charged with being "entitled" in this way--with being unreasonable narcissists for expecting to be able to find work, and then when putting in their hours on the job, live in something better than abject poverty.

However, those whose sense of entitlement is arguably greatest in terms of their expectation that society really will cater to their needs above all others, and press hardest and most successfully for it are, it is difficult to deny, not those who have least, but those who have most. In the neoliberal age that tells the poorest and weakest that they are "entitled" narcissists for having any expectations at all from life, the economic conventional wisdom is that all economic and social policy, all political life, must revolve around creating the good "business climate" conducive to profits. Which, in practice, means that the needs of wants of business (low or nonexistent taxes, massive subsidies, weak and nonexistent regulation) come before the wants and even the needs of everyone else (be it tax equity, public services, the protection of consumers, labor, the environment).

Yet, "no one" considers neoliberalism to be an expression of the sense of "entitlement" of the affluent.

In the 2008 financial crisis, as bailout followed after bailout, transferring the consequences of institutional behavior by banks and brokerages whose stupidity and irresponsibility beggar description from private balance sheets to public, government balance sheets, and in turn precipitated fiscal crisis and economic crisis that rocked the political system to its foundation with consequences we are still witnessing today, there was much criticism--but few thought, or dared, to say that the financial institutions which demanded these bailouts "acted entitled." (Indeed, in the seven hundred and twenty pages he devoted to this revolting history, Tooze did not use the word, or any synonym for it, even once.)

Of course, those who hate welfare for working people have innumerable excuses for the corporate kind. Much of it, they would argue, is not corporate welfare at all--pointing to such things as the risibly lame "Tax breaks are not subsidies" argument (debunked here). Where such dodges are insufficient, they contend that, well, those corporate types getting the welfare--or as they prefer to call them, the entrepreneurs--are the "wealth creators," the ONLY wealth creators (the natural world on which we rely, the working people who actually staff their companies by the thousand and million, the public services supporting their activity are not wealth creators, only parasitic scum in contrast with the "God on Earth" that is the wealth-creating entrepreneur), and they have to do what they have to do.1 In any event, There Is No Alternative.

But don't you DARE call them entitled you entitled plebs!

1. It does not seem excessive to say that the neoliberal's attitude toward the "entrepreneur" is a near-parody of Hegel's attitude toward the state in The Philosophy of Right--God on Earth.