How we abuse entitlements and mismanage intrinsic conflicts to cripple our nation. Part 1

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”  (Walt Kelly in Pogo)

This multi-part essay suggests how we’ve gotten ourselves into the political, economic and religious mess we’re in today and indicates how we might go about making major, systematic, lasting improvements. It addresses three critical concepts in the design and operation of systems, be they political, religious or economic: entitlements, intrinsic conflicts, and tradeoffs.

These concepts and their relationships can be tools to sort productive changes from facile ones, and to develop real and lasting improvements. However, for those looking to self-righteously blame “them” and get “them” to change (them being politicians, bankers, CEO’s, regulators, union leaders, terrorists, etc.) the following remarks will disappoint and even anger. Many of “them” do have to change or be replaced, but that alone is not even a good start; necessary but not sufficient.

Unless we accurately adjust our personal perspectives, unless we realistically adjust what we claim to be our due and our ongoing obligations as individuals, families, citizens, races, religions and tribes, and unless we make serious and possibly frightening personal conversions, we will merely continue to self-righteously find scapegoats while our human experiments of democracy and industrialization collapse and remnants of humanity return to the default conditions of tribalism and scarcity. The need for Personal change should be good news, because it’s something we can do with or without the help of other people. We cannot change others. We can only support and encourage those who chose to lead their own changes.  (See Essay We cannot save other nations! We can only generate failed states  )

Entitlements

The concept of “entitlement” is fundamental to the Industrial Revolution and to all human institutions, political, religious, economic and military. Basically it is a useful human construct that says “because of A, an individual or group is entitled to B”.  Private property rights and intellectual property rights are entitlement s. So too are contracts, salaries and bonuses, interests on property and money, inheritances, corporate entities, lower taxes, the Natural Law, Constitutional Rights, water rights, Medicare, Social Security, seniority and the Senate Filibuster. Military Rank and seniority are relational entitlements within the military community. The Mosaic Covenant was a tribal entitlement. Plenary Indulgences in Christian Crusades for killing infidels and promises of heaven for terrorists who blow themselves up in the name of Allah are entitlements. Promises that believing in Christ will guarantee Salvation, that baptism washes away sins, or that 9 First Friday masses will insure instant admission to heaven are entitlement beliefs.

The benefit and attractiveness of an entitlement is that is enables an individual (or group) to perform some definable actions (often mere rituals) which they believe to provide security, predictability and to increase their scope control and power. An entitlement provides a definable objective or course of action and a belief in greater certainty in an uncertain world. It provides some framework for individual or group initiatives within the larger community.

Perhaps most significantly, an entitlement disperses decision making, breaking up the decision making bottleneck inherent in the hierarchical alternatives where all rights belong to God, the king, religious or tribal leader. (See Essay Management Bottlenecks: primary source of institutional failures  ) When maintaining an entitlement requires hard work and effective decision making, as in competitive markets, it improves the average quality of decisions and actions.  That dispersal and average improvement was a vital ingredient in the Industrial Revolution, where economic entitlements were finally decoupled from political and religious ones in 1688 Great Britain with the peaceful overthrow of James II by William of Orange. Thereafter, the size and scope of economic entitlements were increasingly related to performance in the marketplace. Economic decision making, on average, became a more merited than inherited; not completely of course just a little more so, but enough to help produce dramatically better results in economics, politics and religion. (The emergence of science earlier in 17^th Century also decoupled evidence based decisions from authority based ones helped set the stage for an evidence based economic system as well as an evidence based legal system.)

Entitlements are abused or destructive when they are treated as absolute, inherited, exercised out of context, or acquired without investing compensating resources. Every sustainable entitlement requires an enabling and sustaining commitment (energy and resources) from both the individual and from the larger community; a commitment that must either be fully earned by the beneficiary in terms of replenishing resources in kind or else be sucked out of community in the way that a parasite drains its host without providing compensating benefits.

All of us who abuse entitlements or who create abusive entitlements create a parasitic load on the community, one that weakens and eventually kills it. After the Great Depression and WWII, the Greatest Generation returned from an uncertain world in which they found themselves with relatively few creature comforts and entitlements. They taxed themselves heavily, delayed personal gratifications and built the world’s greatest economic and political infrastructure so as to protect their children from having to make their sacrifices.

However, the Boomers, raised in this cocoon of economic, political and emotional infrastructure, considered it all their rightful inheritance necessitating merely an adequately strong military to hold on to it. That attitude of entitlement nurtured an ever growing parasitic load of benefits without sacrifice or investment. At first the parasitic load merely drained reserves built by the Greatest Generation and could be ignored; just as a healthy person can carry some parasites without obvious symptoms. However, over the last 30 years the parasitic load has grown to the point that our society is beginning to look emaciated; economically, politically and spiritually. There is no one entitlement that has brought us to our knees, and trying to identify the straw that broke or will break the camel’s back is a pointless exercise in scapegoating. However, it is certain that you and I are part of that crippling parasitic load; a certainty which motivates us to find scapegoats.

Abusive economic entitlements are only one form of the parasitic load. Political examples include abusive use of First Amendment Rights (Supreme Court may strangle our democracy ) which enable the rich and powerful to drown out the individual. (See essay To Preserve our Bill of Rights we need a Bill of Obligations ). Other political examples include abuse of the Filibuster, Senatorial privileges, seniority rights and lower taxes which have weakened government at all levels and supported self-righteous people on the right and left. Abusive religious interpretations include rituals and biblical promises which are purported to absolutely entitle some to heaven or to land; these abuses have alienated American citizens from one another and created an intractable Middle East filled with self-righteous people of all faiths.

A community can indefinitely sustain an entitlement when it is mutually beneficial and when both the community and the entitled realize that it is mutually beneficial. When an entitlement is not mutually beneficial, or believed not to be, then it can temporarily be sustained by deceit, by ignorance or by force but will eventually weaken or destroy the larger system.

Consider the following propositions about how we look upon entitlements:

1. My entitlements are fully justified and “paid” for.
2. My entitlements pretty much define me.
3. I’ll support your entitlements as long as they don’t compromise my own. (This is a principle source of resistance to Health Care Reform since those who now have priority access to it accurately realize that including more people makes their own entitlement less certain, however slightly.)
4. There are plenty of “them” whose entitlements are not justified or fully paid for, and they’re depleting our nation.

I suggest, with all due respect, that there is not one of us who can support the first proposition with credible evidence. The second proposition is sadly accurate for most of us.  I also suggest that the fourth proposition is our clever way of avoiding having to honestly face the first 3.  The purpose of this point is not to blame, but to call for a change in perspective, one that can lead to dialog, mutual respect and a more sustainable political, economic and religious civilization. (Part 2 will address intrinsic conflicts and tradeoffs. In Part 3 I’ll suggest how to use these ideas for productive results.)

(Continued in: Part 2)