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Entitlement is the belief that you have the right to do or get something. In social interactions, it is considering your right to do or get something to be superior the rights of those who may want you to do or get something else. When you feel entitled, you are not merely disappointed when others disagree with you or fail to accommodate your presumed rights, you feel cheated and wronged, which produces anger and a stronger sense of entitlement as compensation. Of course, once you're older than five and not cute anymore, the world is not likely to meet your entitlement needs. So it gets to be a downward spiral -- the more you don't get what you think you deserve, the more justified you feel in demanding compensation. The person who cuts in front of you in line is often saying, "With the way I've been treated, I shouldn't have to wait in line, too!" Not surprisingly, criminals, domestic violence offenders, aggressive drivers, and abusers of all kinds have been observed to have an exaggerated sense of entitlement.
Unfortunately, exaggerated entitlement is not merely the domain of those who run afoul of the law. In the daytime talk-show, self-help, personal-growth mania that dominates popular culture, we are entitled not just to the pursuit of happiness, not even just to happiness, but to feeling good most of the time. I believe this new sense of entitlement, this "cult of feeling good," is partly responsible for the reported sharp increases in anger and stress.
Chances are, the emotional states you observe most often in the course of a typical day is some form of low-grade resentment, usually manifest as impatience, agitation, annoyance, irritability, sarcasm, superiority, or frustration, plus entitlement. Resentment comes from a perception of unfairness; you're not getting the expected help, relief, consideration, praise, reward, or affection, i.e., you're not getting that to which you feel entitled.
Compounding the situation is the incredible contagion of even low-grade defensive/aggressive emotional states like resentment. If someone comes into work resentful, by lunchtime everyone around him or her is resentful. Aggressive drivers make other drivers aggressive. A hostile teenager ruins the family dinner, and an impatient spouse makes TV-viewing tense and unpleasant.
The rapid, largely unconscious transmission of defensive/aggressive emotions (described in the emerging literature on social intelligence) has created a kind of emotional pollution. The psychological equivalent to litter and secondary smoke, emotional pollution is the spread of defensive/aggressive emotions in the environment, in complete disregard of their adverse effects on others. The most casual contact with emotional polluters can make you feel dismissed, ignored, defensive, impatient, self-righteous, sullen, or depressed, with no clue of where those feelings are coming from. If you encounter emotional pollution at work or on the street, you will not be so sweet to your children when you get home. If you face it before you leave the house in the morning, you're likely to drive aggressively or carelessly on the way to work and be in a sour mood once you get there. Emotional pollution passes cubicle-by-cubicle throughout the workplace, car-by-car down the road, locker-by-locker in school, and room-by-room at home. Worst of all, if you are exposed to enough emotional pollution over time, you are bound to start spreading it yourself, unless you develop pretty strong self-regulation skills.
One reason that defensive/aggressive emotions spread so relentlessly is that they feel very different on the inside than they look on the outside. On the inside you feel like a victim; you're being treated unfairly. On the outside it looks mean or, at best, unfriendly. If you feel that nobody truly gets you or appreciates where you're coming from, you may well be guilty of some form of emotional pollution, which inevitably controls the way people react to you.
Try this mirror test to see if you're an emotional polluter. Standing in front of a large mirror, think of something you resent. Think of how unfair it is and how it should not be that way. You'll find that in doing this, you'll look down or away from the mirror, but really concentrate on how unfair the thing you resent is and force yourself to look back at the mirror with that disgruntled expression intact. You will see what the world sees.
In the next post, I'll talk about how aggression rises inevitably out of the defensiveness created by entitlement.
