In this article we are going to look at how entitlement works globally and see the reasons behind our bank failures, our pension failures, our financial institutions and then we'll bring it into a very personal level of how our attitudes of entitlement are bringing failures into our own lives. We'll look at ways to reverse this. We'll look at the issue of why our attitudes of entitlement are a luxury that we can no longer afford.
In the old days, on a global level, our standard of living was much lower. Our cars were basic, our entertainment was much less costly and in most economies around the world, families were able to make it on one income.
Over the years, as our standard of living rose higher and higher, it now takes two incomes just to survive. Instead of using one car for the family, now we see two cars or more for the family. Instead of just going to a movie and some place inexpensive for dinner for a special night out - now we have very expensive forms of entertainment.
In the old days, when we had a much lower standard of living people actually sat around in the evening and talked to one another. They even read books. They listened to the radio and used their imagination to recreate the scenes in their heads. If you had a telephone, it was a luxury. People made appointments to see one another, they didn't sit on the phone for hours on end. Nowadays, there's very little personal interaction. People sit on cellphones, they do text messaging, they sit on their computers, they do instant messaging, emails or messageboards - and social interaction has become a thing of the past.
We are now leading very insular lives and the end result is that we have more cases of depression, especially among teenagers and young adults. We see more people today on anti-depressants than any other time in the history of mankind. This is more than just being dissatisfied with your lot in life. It has more to do with feeling a lack of purpose in your life. Having family and friends around you to share the good times and the bad times. This is about being able to live your life without having a single person in your life. Anything and everything that you can possibly want or need can be purchased online. You don't ever have to leave your house. In so many different ways we can see the breakdown of the family and of the community coinciding with the breakdown of the economy.
The higher standard of living that we've grown accustomed to isn't really about buying toilet paper in different colours, but it's actually separating ourselves from the family unit. Instead of listening to the radio and using our creative imagination, or reading a book and letting it take us to different locales, now we have to be entertained. Now we don't entertain ourselves. Now we need TV, video games, the internet...but the worst part is that we have isolated ourselves from each other.
Instead of conversation, we plant ourselves in front of TV's. Instead of board games that can be played with the family, we're now playing games on the computers - we're having online relationships that are usually disappointing and we aren't reading books like we used to. People used to have to develop social skills. Now with modern technology and a lack of social interaction, social skills seem to be at the bottom of the list of priorities.
Unfortunately the ills of society cannot be reversed by waving a magic wand over them. As a rule people don't change unless they are forced to change. So how do we get past this attitude of entitlement? That the world owes us a living? That if you don't have what you want that it's ok to steal?
How do we go back to the basics of child-rearing?
Where the parents made the rules and the children obeyed them. How do we get parents to see that their permissive attitude is damaging their children? That it's not ok to whine and cry until you get your own way. That we're raising a generation of children who are growing up to be irresponsible adults who are not held accountable for their actions.
These same children will grow up to be dissatisfied with life, blaming others for their failures and not able to hold down a job.
So before we can fix the economy, we have to fix ourselves. We have to learn how to put back into the community what we have taken from it. We have to hold our bankers and our financial institutions accountable for everything. Our greed on a personal level corresponds with the greed on a corporate level. We have only to look at the increase in shoplifting to the CEO's of major corporations who have stolen from their company's pension funds. Now that we're facing very very hard times, we need to see how our attitude is causing our own destruction.
When the economy started to go down, a taxi driver in New York City was asked what he was going to do if people didn't have enough money to take taxis and he couldn't pay his bills. Without batting an eyelid and having to think twice about it, he said "I'd steal."
I heard of a woman in her 40's who walked through the produce department of a supermarket and started to eat the grapes and cherries that were on display. She didn't pay for them, nor did she feel guilty for having taken them. It was as if she had the right to sample whatever goods were out there. Although security would not have been called for pilfering grapes, especially since the goods would not be found on her, it's easy to see why a storeowner's losses would have to be passed onto its customers.
When doctors and patients submit fraudulent insurance claims - those costs aren't just washed away - they get passed onto the other people who are insured.
I recently heard of a man who went into the hospital and was there for close to a month. A neighbour of his was one of his golfing buddies, and he was also a doctor. And every day he came to the hospital, he said hello to his friend. They talked about gold, about politics, their hobbies... and not once did he discuss this man's medical problems.. and this man thought it was very nice of his neighbour to drop by. When he got his bill from the hospital, he was absolutely outraged to see that that neighbour charged his insurance company for every single visit for the month that he was there.
While most people would shrug their shoulders and not do anything about it because they didn't have to pay for it out of their own pocket, this man called his insurance company and reported the fraud. He then called this doctor friend of his and told him that if he didn't call the insurance company and rectify his mistake, he was going to contact the media and start an investigation. They lived in a small town and the doctor realised that he would be forced out of business if he didn't drop the charges, which is probably the only reason he eventually notified the insurance company that he was dropping those charges.
The entitlement issues we face today can be traced back to the low standards we set for our children. The bar needs to be set higher, much higher. We are raising children who reach adulthood as grasping individuals taking whatever they can from whomever they wish without stopping to question their actions.
I recently heard of a widow in her late 50's who sold the farm that she and her husband had owned for all of their marriage. She moved to a smaller place and planned on using the profits from the sale as her retirement income. Her children were so angry that they even refused to speak to her. They felt that the money from the sale was their inheritance and it should go to them. What kind of distorted thinking is that? She and her husband had worked the farm, had put in their life's energy in that farm and she had every right to sell it and do whatever she wished with the money she received from it. Her adult children were living their own lives, earning their own money, and not supporting her. They weren't entitled to one cent, yet they are trying to make her feel guilty for taking what she so rightfully earned.
In the US, they have been conducting surveys among middle management to upper-management employees who were laid off when their company's downsized. There seems to be a growing trend among these people to try for a few months to find other employment, but then shortly afterwards, they give up and stop looking because they cannot find a job that pays the same kind of money. What we see happening to these people - they empty out their retirement funds, their pensions, their savings accounts, their family's savings accounts, and mortgage their houses to the hilt. They have decided not to look for a job. If they cannot get the kind of money that they had been making, they are choosing to go on unemployment for however long it lasts and to live off everyone else. Some of them are sending their spouses to work at menial jobs, others are collecting food stamps and welfare and this number is growing rapidly. These are people who are able-bodied and capable of working but who choose not to - and society is supporting them.
You don't have to look further than this to see how a country's economic crisis is irrevocably tied to the entitlement issues of its populace.
A couple of years ago, I heard of a teenager who asked her father for a car after she got her license. Her parents were divorced and her father was trying to compensate for not being in the house as a full-time dad. He didn't have much money so he got her a new Volkswagen. She was so angry that he didn't get her a luxury car, that she deliberately rammed her car into a stone wall and practically demolished it. Her father couldn't even claim on the insurance because it was deliberate. He ended up buying her a used car so that she would have transportation. This father, as well-meaning as he probably thought he was, only contributed to his daughter's sense of entitlement. Had I been that child's parent, I would never have bought her a replacement car and I would have had her go out and get a job and pay back, each week from her salary, every penny of the amount of the new car that she had been given.
This disregard for property, for other people's financial problems, and for other people's feelings represents the kind of attitude that is running rampant among many cultures. When parents accept this kind of behaviour from their children, they are setting their children up for failure as adults and of course this plays right into the failure of the economy of countries around the world.
How can we expect our politicians, our bankers, our financial institutions, our corporations, to exhibit more accountability than we expect from our own children?
Many children, single and married, move back home into their parents' home because they cannot afford to make it on their own. At what point does a parent know that a child must learn how to survive on their own and stop taking money from their parents? At what point do parents know when they are causing more harm than good by continuing to treat their offspring as children? When they continue to make life easy for their children, these children will not know how to survive on their own when their parents die. It is far better to teach children moral and financial responsibility when they are young than have to learn it the hard way when they are older.
I had to learn this the hard way myself. My father kept on giving me money, even when I was in my 30's and I never really learned how to be independent financially. It took me telling him that I didn't need his help (even when I really did at the time), and then I learned how to stand on my own two feet and how to earn and manage money effectively.
I could go on and on giving you examples of entitlement in every strata of society, but the ones that I have cited are ample demonstrations of how we're contributing to the downfall of our economy. We're doing this on the local level, the national level and the international level. We're taking the path of least resistance and while we're holding everyone else accountable for their actions, we're taking no responsibility for our own.
It's time to reverse the status quo: Let's try an experiment: for one week, between this show and next week's show, try denying yourself something 3 times a day. Learn how to say no to yourself. Learn how to question your actions, how to observe them and question the validity of them.
