The road to hell is paved with entitlement
I'm shocked! Shocked to find that ingratitude is going on in here.
A bit of housekeeping, if you will permit it, before I roll with this week’s column.
During the past month, Howlin’ at the Moon has doubled its number of subscribers. I’d like to take a moment to welcome everyone who’s new. You can find some information about me in my byline and bio, but in terms of content, a number of factors have influenced the experiences that frame what I write about here: being the head of a household at 12, several decades of climbing, skiing, and guiding; 24 years teaching physics and astronomy at a university; motorcycle road racing and high-adventure dirt bike single track riding; raising kids; and finally, running a musical production company.
I’m now retired. I spend my time these days writing, doing podcasts, riding bicycles, hanging out with my kids, arranging music, and playing jazz guitar. I don’t watch much TV, but I am a voracious reader of just about everything. I like the NFL, college basketball, and the Cincinnati Reds.
I’m a big fan of good movies, which means that I’ve had to learn to live with a lot of disappointment.
Politically, I’m a middle-of-the-road kind of guy. It’s pretty much the same when it comes to social mores. My general philosophy is to live and let live. As long as what you are into doesn’t affect me too much, what you do is your business. It’s when you try to force your business to be my business that we gotta talk.
About the only “extreme” position I hold is that I am irredeemably irreligious.
As a writer, I’ve completed two books and have another in development. I’ve written for a slew of magazines and journals. And I’ve written a column for the Idaho State Journal for several decades. I’ve been on Substack for a bit less than two years. I’m very happy with both the platform and the growth of Howlin’.
I don’t paywall a lot on Howlin’, just comments and Science Friday videos and podcasts. I’m pleased as punch that over 1/3 of you are paid subscribers anyway. Nothing makes any creator feel better than an audience that’s willing to pay when they don’t really have to. Beginning with this column, I’m going to include a feature that allows anyone who likes a particular piece but doesn’t want to commit to a subscription to leave a tip via Venmo. Buy me a morning coffee!
Now, let’s get after it.
Perdition, thy name is entitlement. If I were forced to conjure up a single human characteristic lurking out there on the down low likely to be responsible for a societal implosion in the next few years, it just might be entitlement. The number of endlessly entitled and simultaneously clueless individuals out in the world is just stunning. I know that correlation is not causation, but, sweet Jesus Palomino, these two things sure do seem joined at the hip to me.
Entitlement has always been with us and seems mostly associated with those who inherit wealth or other types of prosperity and success. The Roman nobility, among many others, were mighty entitled. This is nothing new. It’s just more widespread these days and propped up by less gravitas.
Let me stake out my position on entitlement as a starting point. As far as I’m concerned, the universe owes you nothing. If you are reading this, you’ve already won the lottery as far as that goes, and you should thank your lucky stars.
The universe is a vast and mostly empty place that does not favor advanced forms of life. Unimaginably violent forces from exploding stars, intense fields of radiation, and violent collisions permeate most places in our universe where there’s enough matter to condense into stars and planets.
We happen to exist on a planet that’s just the right distance from just the right type of star to permit the development of life. The primordial cloud from which our solar system condensed was rich with the elements necessary for organic chemistry to eventually produce us. Large planets in the right places protect us from asteroid strikes. And we just so happen to have an unusually sized satellite at just the right distance from us to stabilize our precessional wobble and dampen tectonic activity.
So here we are. Unique. I’m not seeing a parade of species elsewhere in the universe; the Drake equation be damned.
The universe has bestowed a lot on all of us. So STFU about what you are due by virtue of your mere existence and try to enjoy every day above ground without whining. Life’s short, then you’re dead for a long time. Snap out of it.
Entitlement as a force of nature, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t exist. Entitlement is an invention of human beings, and some of it is actually warranted. If you pay your insurance bill and get into a car wreck, you are entitled to a settlement. If you pay your taxes, you are entitled to good infrastructure. If you put your money into an interest-bearing account, you are entitled to some profit. And if you make an agreement with someone, you are entitled to expect the other party to hold up their end.
But what you are not entitled to is any unearned consideration from me or from anyone else. It’s not my job to tiptoe around your triggers. It’s not my job, unless you are a child (or an adult with diminished capacity) under my supervision, to create safe spaces for you. It’s not my job to listen to your opinions or take seriously anything that you have to say. It’s not my responsibility to take you seriously in any way, shape, form, manner, or style.
No, you have to earn any of the above. And you earn any of the above with a solid work ethic, by demonstrating reliability and perseverance, and by building trust. If you pay your dues, educate yourself, and demonstrate that you are useful for something, the rest of the world may eventually regard you as worthy of some entitlement. But entitlement is not the default state of the human condition.
When I was lecturing at the university, I encountered legions of students who were convinced that the college experience consisted of four or more years of minimal effort in required courses, collecting a diploma, and then entering the workforce with high compensation based solely on the acquisition of a degree that was often of dubious merit. The fact that one might be expected to actually know something or have developed a work ethic somewhere along the way wasn’t a consideration.
It was the same with new hires at the university. The majority of new faculty and administrators expected their credentials to do all of the talking (and subsequently all of the work). I can assure you, from many years of bitter experience, that there are few things more insufferable than a newly minted PhD, especially in bullshit academic fields.
So now we have the omnipresent specter of the clueless yet entitled demanding things that are unearned and things to which they are definitely not entitled. We have spoiled college students demanding that a local bakery be shut down because they don’t like the owners preventing underage alcohol sales and policing shoplifting. We have another university booting a local coffee shop’s satellite operation off campus because a few students and administrators had their feelings hurt over a blue lives matter display that wasn’t even in the campus coffee shop.
We have an entire industry, DEI, that’s invaded academia, government, and corporate America like Kudzu, whose very existence is predicated upon the notion that one group of people is owed something by everyone else based on identity rather than merit.
We have extreme partisans on both sides of our great political divide who believe they are entitled to force everyone to see things their way and battle fiercely to make sure that they wield the levers of power so as to impose their views on everyone else with the law and government.
And my personal favorites, the religious nimrods, who’d convert us all to their way of spirituality with a good old-fashioned auto-da-fé if they could. See the current conflict in Gaza for how this works it’s way along.
There are, of course, many more examples, but you get my point.
Everything that these folks think that they are entitled to is something that someone else worked their ass off to either produce or earn for themselves. There’d be no prosperity for you, me, or anyone else in this country without a lot of hardship and sacrifice from our forbears. Those with an unearned sense of entitlement need to get with the program and start either producing or earning.
Entitlement is vastly overused and vastly underdeserved. It’s becoming a bane of modern existence. And it’s a pain in the ass to put up with if you ever went to the trouble of earning something that you desired.
If we don’t start doing more to convince people that earning and entitlement, despite being close to each other in the dictionary, aren’t close in meaning, this might be what boots us irrevocably down the road to perdition.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
Regarding academic titles . . . We all know what BS is, right? Well MS is just “more of the same” while Ph.D is just “piled higher and deeper.” I once repeated this chuckle in one of my Department meetings and my colleagues were not amused. But then again there is that “Doctor of Arts” promoted by the Carnegie Foundation but that failed to flourish except in the ecological niche of Idaho State University whose obscurity guaranteed its holders having to fight uphill to get hired elsewhere. Well the inside joke about the DoA degree was that it stood for “dead on arrival.”
Excellent column Martin. May millions read and heed.