TRANSCRIPT
Speaker: Entitlement is when people feel that they are more valuable at some inherent level than others. They can do what they want to others, and others really don’t count that much. I think I’d like to start off with giving a couple of examples that come to my mind when I think about entitlement. One that I see living a lot of my life in New York City is watching people and their dogs. Now, a lot of people who are dog owners in New York are not entitled. They’re actually respectful people. But some people with their dogs, they’re just entitled. They let their dogs run off the leash even though there are leash laws, so their dogs can run free and do whatever they want, bump into other people, stress out other people, stress out other dogs, and they feel like the rules simply don’t apply to them. Their dogs are jumping into gardens, tearing stuff up, or even when they have their dog on the leash, they walk down the sidewalk and their leash and their dog take over the whole sidewalk, and everyone has to get out of their way. And they act like they and their dog and their leash on the sidewalk, and it’s like, God, they are so entitled. They don’t care about anyone.
A second example I’d like to give happens sometimes when I go to the supermarket and I’m waiting in line. Some of the supermarkets in New York City allow you to buy food by weight. So you put it in a little box, and when you get up to the cash register, they weigh it, and then you pay for how much you have bought by weight. Well, what I say sometimes when I wait in line is there are people who are eating the food in line before they have waited, meaning basically they’re stealing food, but they’re doing it right out in the open. And what they are saying is all of you people are actually buying food, but I’m actually eating it right in front of you and not going to pay for it, and I just don’t care. And it’s such an entitled attitude that they have. It’s like they again think that the rules do not apply to them.
So let me sit back and analyze it. Where does entitlement come from, and what really fundamentally is it? Well, one thing again that I see when I see people who are entitled, I think what’s going through their mind at some level is I more important than you, myself is more important than yourself. But that’s not really it. I think that’s how they just justify it in their mind somehow. I think what they’re really saying, if I can analyze it, analyze their unconscious, what they’re really saying or what they’re really expressing, maybe it’s a better way to put it, is my false self is more important than what I perceive to be your lack of a self. Basically, what it is is these people who are that entitled, that’s not who they really are in their soul. That’s not the truth and beauty of them. What really they are doing is they’re living through a false self. They’re disconnected from who they are. They don’t really have a real connected integrated self, and what they’re doing is going through the world treating everybody else like they don’t even exist, like they have no value.
And what does that mean? Also, I think strangely enough, the people who are that entitled, they don’t have a self, and they don’t think anybody else has a self either. Therefore, nobody else counts. And what is this? How does someone become that way? Well, for me, this really goes back to someone’s early childhood, their early family of origin. And what I’ve seen when I’ve talked to these people, gotten to know them, observed them in their lives, is they had early lives where they were treated as human beings on an emotional level as people of no consequence. Their self was not honored. They were not really loved. They weren’t really cherished for who they were. Sometimes they were treated on the surface like they were important. They were cherished on the surface. They were given all sorts of things, perhaps told they were special, told they were of value. But the really deeper message, the real message on an emotional level was that they didn’t count. And so they grew up feeling like they were nobody, and they actually had to push down all their real feelings because they weren’t loved. They were rejected. They were betrayed. And so all they were left with was this false self, this idea that they were somehow special and important. And they lived through this band of falsity. They live this band of fakeness, and this fakeness became their self. And other people also to them were not real because often their parents were the exact same way. Their parents didn’t have a real self. Their parents weren’t really connected because no parent who really had a deeply connected sense of self would treat their child that way. No parent who had a real sense of self would raise a child to become that way.
So what this child grew up in was an environment of not-self. Their work cells around there, and so they entered the world treating others the exact same way. Nobody counts because in a way nobody exists. And at some level, I don’t even exist really on the inside. All I exist is in this kind of fake place of being dissociated, but at the same time feeling special and important. And this brings up another thing. When people are entitled, when people are stealing in line right in front of everyone else, or people are letting their dogs tread all over the place and be disrespectful, actually to be entitled is very hostile. There’s a real hostility in it. They don’t acknowledge that hostility. They don’t say it there. They would often deny that they’re being hostile at all, but they really are being hostile. And again, this comes down to their early childhood. This comes down to their history. They were raised in a hostile environment. When people have children and don’t love them properly, don’t care for them properly, don’t honor their real self, and instead just treat them in all these different fake ways and raise them to think that they’re special, whereas really they don’t love them, that is a very hostile way to raise a child.
So these children know hostility. They have been raised with hostility, and the result is deep, deep down inside themselves, in a buried place, they’re angry as hell. They’re pissed off at their parents, and what they do when they grow up is they displace this onto the world. They treat the world often like garbage. They disrespect the world. That is a big part of entitlement, that they don’t care about others’ feelings, and often they want other people to feel bad. This is part of the psychological repetition compulsion. They have a compulsion to do to others what was done to them, and at some level that they’re totally not aware of, it’s a striving to try to heal. At some level, it’s an example by which they could conceivably learn about what happened to them if only they could reconnect with their feelings. However, one thing that I think about, and it comes to my mind, a third example of entitlement, and probably the most poignant example of entitlement and the most important example of entitlement that I could give, more important than people stealing food in line publicly or having their dogs act out all over the place, is people who have children and don’t respect them, don’t love them, don’t have the emotional capacity to really raise them in an incredibly loving and healthy way, in a consistent way. People who abandon their children, it’s so incredibly entitled. Would they think it’s okay to treat their children as if their children are not of value? To actually bring a human being into the world and not give that child the best, best chance to grow up and have a self, a real true self? To me, it’s the ultimate example of entitlement, and also it’s the ultimate root of where all entitlement comes from.