Habits of entitlement
There is a class of people who think that pedestrians and cyclists should keep out of the way of cars. Not of course as an immediate avoiding action but as policy. A colleague who serves on a panel in Merseyside will confirm that the Merseyside Police think that road safety is about keeping roads safe for motorists. He finds that infuriating in a pillar-of-the-community sort of way.
If there was a single thing that would make a substantive difference to our future it is abolishing car culture. Cars are almost as deep in our psyche as food. As a wonderful metaphor, the lovely man we bought this smallholding from wanted it so that he and his children could race quadbikes on the fields. To be fair he was a motorcycle racing champion in his youth, but the contrast with us trying to improve the soils and raise top quality food could not be greater.
It’s not about cars. As I understand it, if we all drove electric cars things would not be much better. For instance, the major source of microplastics in our air and water is car tyres. This is about entitlement. I am entitled to put your life at risk by driving a car. Of course, electric cars have greater acceleration and are quieter, so they will kill you quicker and more often! You need to be a pedestrian or cyclist in Liverpool to detect how stupidly dangerous road safety policies can be and how much the whole feel of a place can improve when the status quo is challenged.
We really need to understand entitlement; there is nothing rational or logical about it. I worked in a geophysical processing office where the work was seasonal. Most of the staff could do their work in 20 hours in the winter. When we were suddenly busy again, it took months to get back to a normal work rate, and people were not skiving. They had become entitled to work more slowly.[1] Clearly entitlement is something you see in others.
Are we entitled to healthcare or do we have to fight for social provisions? Are we entitled to a meaningful vote or do we have to put up with sham democracy? Each of these questions faces two ways: towards the effect of entitlement on the problem and towards the effect on the entitled person. The driver who does not have entitled attitudes and respects other road users is far less risk and improves the local environment. The person who believes they are entitled to a vote is actually passively undermining the voting system.
We live on minor country lane with almost no traffic. It passes right in front of the house and the grandchildren play out all the time. My daughter painted some signs that say Slow: Free-range Children and Animals. Almost all white van men respect this.
Entitled attitudes
In Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk and in the series of dialogues he is doing with Nora Bateson, you can generate a clear view of the entitlement that goes with colonialism. He says that the rights to Aboriginal lands are unlikely ever to be respected, despite the fact that they are clear and have never been ceded. However, Aboriginal law insists that power and authority be kept completely separate otherwise we are all dead. He suggests that the settlers need to be brought inside Aboriginal law.
Imagine what it is like to be condemned, ultimately to death, by entitled people who, despite all the ‘evidence’, do not know what they are doing and are ignorant destroyers of a continent. Rather than the remnants of people who managed creative and evolving stewardship of the land for thousands of years, it is the wreckers of the last two hundred years who get to make decisions.
I like the way this relativises the concept of law. There is a law that is just and there is a settlers’ law that is not. There is a law that works for people and one that destroys them. Are you going to argue about what is the legal law?[2]
The entitled attitude blocks any self-awareness of the effects of what happens. If you are entitled to make decisions about other people’s lives, even if that is just being entitled to drive a car, then you will not understand what the implications are. It is your right to make decisions and therefore you can make them no matter what results. This is why entitlement is so odious: there is no redress.
Ownership of knowledge
My colleague John Smith rails against the ownership of knowledge in a closely parallel way. Trained and licensed dieticians give advice every day that leads to chronic long-term conditions and death in their patients. But they own ‘nutritional advice’ so they are never going to be held to account. Actually, when they trigger a legal trial of someone who gives different advice they lose comprehensively and completely. The story of Tim Noakes’ trial in South Africa (Real Food on Trial: How the Diet Dictators Tried to Destroy a Top Scientist) is a harrowing tale of vicious smear and university bullying.
Not only are people that own knowledge entitled to try and destroy the career of people who are better scientists than they are, but when they are found to have failed in their own duty of care, nothing changes.
Why would powerful institutions and corporations not try to take over the relevant regulator so they get to impose their ownership of knowledge on everyone else. And why would corporations that ‘need to’ not make sure they can control the regulator’s agenda from the wings? Now think about why Aboriginal law understands that power and authority must be kept separate. And think about trying to pack the Supreme Court in the US. Why would people with both power and authority not try to cement both?
I did a little bit of work around the Deep Horizon disaster for Preventable Surprises. What happened was a direct result of the capture of the regulator by the oil industry in the US. BP had several previous serious safety incidents, enough to conclude that their safety culture was not good enough. The regulator ‘knew’ that BP were doing everything in their power to improve safety. I am reminded of the fact that Zuckerberg has been apologising and promising to improve for 17 years now!
When you hear the WHO or PHEngland saying this is what we all must eat or these are the medicines that we all must take, then your very first thought must be “what am I being distracted from?”. An urgent agenda does not come from a concern for the public. It must however wear those clothes, or it won’t be able to deliver the real agenda. This is the very heart of entitledness: the ability to dictate to others without any transparency as to whose interests are being served.
Disruption
I hate all those articles and books that start by saying that the pace of change goes up and up. I am not sure it is, and I am not sure what people think they are measuring and seeing when they think it is. However, from the point of view of hidden assumptions and their big cousin entitlement, we are certainly in an era of disruption.
If you are entitled, whether you know it or not, a disruption in the circumstances that surround that entitlement will feel like revolution. That is just about all you need to know about white supremacy in the US. When it becomes evident that non-whites have more of the answers and a more intelligent response to the circumstances, where is there to go? When you try to resist that with force and non-whites push back even when their lives are at risk, how do you regain control? When an obvious supremacy in power is suddenly looked down on with incomprehension by people you thought had no value, that is a huge shift in your world. From top dog to trash, that is quite a journey.
I saw in the news just now that a renewable energy company had overtaken Exxon in capital value, when Exxon used to be the world’s largest company, you can go from being obviously indispensable to being an also-ran. I don’t think anyone copes with that easily, and what we are considering here is being able to see when having the rug pulled is a blessing, is the root to being able to thrive.
I have a friend whose husband does high-powered marketing projects. He told Sara that she is a supermarket’s worst nightmare. She goes into a supermarket only when she needs to, and she only buys what she went in for! She simply does not buy into other people’s agendas, in the nicest possible way. But think about what that says about our society. We indeed are fodder for marketing and merchandising to. I recognise in Sara that she exposes the entitlement that the supermarkets feel. When I consulted to Tesco, their language was all about capturing a higher and higher percentage of “their” customers’ spend. All that talk about the customer being king is, well, interesting.
Patterns
The examples in this blog are from all over. It is not what the entitled person thinks or does. Rees-Mogg may or may not have sound views and espouse a decent policy. It is about a pattern of behaviour that blinds the person concerned, making it unlikely that they have a grip, and that arouses deep opposition in others.
What an expert knows is relative to his funding and context. His expertise is not necessarily applicable to your situation and not necessarily valid when your interests are taken into account. There is no context-free knowledge or expertise. Experts that are prepared to use their expertise to understand what is best for you specifically are like gold dust. And if an expert is thinks he is entitled to have his advice respected, irrespective of your interests, then you should run a mile.
I am using “his” to denote the standard, ubiquitous, male expert. For what it is worth, my experience of female experts is that they are either much better or much worse at understanding their own entitlement.
Ask yourself how many GPs in your experience think they are entitled to tell you what to do and how many really want to increase the control you have over health issues. How many of them are prepared to accept that they may have caused you damage? How many of them will side with the evidence of your eyes (and their eyes!) over the official dogma? The result of GP entitlement is simply that it takes decades for practice to change and that in itself costs many lives. Not that I believe in medical progress, because of all the conflicts of interest.
The notion of competition buried somewhere in the heart of people’s notion of capitalism is supposed to be able to destroy entrenched beliefs of all sorts. I find that unconvincing because entitled players are continually entrenching their entitlement with all sorts of spurious claims and reasoning. Listen to the big banks arguing that they should be bailed out again.
Indeed, I don’t know how to deal with entitlement in any systematic manner. I think the best response to Rees-Mogg is probably helpless mirth. I think the best response to a GP who think they know better is to outflank them and rub their nose in the results. But learning to be bolder about our ability to make progress when entitled authority is clearly conflicted is a tough road to walk. We don’t know the questions to ask, we don’t know the alternative sources of wisdom, we are bamboozled by journalists and their tricksy narratives.[3]
Now go back to yourself and others as motorists. How far are we from improving the safety of cyclist and pedestrian? Do we have some normalised idea of what safe driving looks like that is simply a continuation of the anti-social patterns? I was persuaded onto one of those safety awareness courses after having been caught on a speed camera: every single person in the room, myself included, were adamant they had done nothing wrong…
[1] Entitled or just accustomed? Consider the west-coast east-coast divide in North America and its attendant pace-of-life differences. On arriving in the UK, Philip found initially that his Canadian pace-of-work habits gave him an edge. They’ve long worn off, of course, and can be difficult to muster when needed.
[2] Topical at the time of writing, given that the UK Government was willfully blurring lines about what constituted legal international laws, and, by implication, who is entitled to be outraged by what infractions.
[3] Leaving aside the infamous Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. You turn the page, forget what you know, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate than the baloney you just read.”
