You are entitled to nothing

Life is about mastering the conditions you are born into.

I recently came across a comment by

Resavager

that got me thinking.

He is correct. You have no rights.

What we call rights are really entitlements. Using this word is less comfortable as it has retained the notion of a privilege conferred by others or an agreed communal process. They are not automatic which means they can be removed.

“Rights” are inventions. They therefore don’t really exist in any meaningful sense unless you have some means to enforce them.

Most require elaborate societal scaffolding like tradition and convention, or respect for the law. All of these have been under attack for decades by the very people obsessed by individual rights and are now in decline in Western nations.

This is predictable and demonstrates rights are a temporary phenomenon. Most are a historical anomaly, from reproductive rights to gay rights, they would not have made any sense even to recent ancestors.

Since they will not last they are not something to rely upon. You therefore have no rights, only temporary advantages, and reliance on this is not a workable strategy over the long-term.

Entitlement is for the weak

Most entitlements are privileges granted by the powerful to cultivate support. Elites in Western nations, for instance, care nothing for women or minorities, but they will aggressively pursue job quotas for them to hamper their real target, white men whom they view as dangerous to their plans.

Favoured groups are often targeted precisely because they will never be a threat to anyone important. If you are the recipient of some invented “right” bear this in mind. The need for your artificial entitlement is usually a sign of some weakness that will reassert itself over time.

Being elevated because of an inherent characteristic you can’t change reinforces a static mindset encouraging us to overlook things we have control over to improve our lives. This fixed mindset ossifies over time, becoming rigid and inflexible, unable to meet the ever-changing demands of life.

Only a growth mindset helps us develop. The belief we can change our circumstances and improve them to achieve our goals. We can get somewhere even if dealt a poor hand by life.

A rights-based world therefore establishes mediocrity as the norm as the inflexible and unworthy rise to positions of authority all on the basis of entitlements granted by others.

Zero entitlement

The safest position is to assume zero entitlement. You will have to work for it all. Better still is to be thankful if you have no special treatment and to reject it if you do.

We are born into a world we have no real control over. It is constrained by conditions. Economy, culture, technology and belief systems all play their part.

Some of these naturally work in your favour, others work against you.

You inherit these conditions. Your job is to master them. If you do, you have a fighting chance to navigate life well.

Understanding how an economy works helps you make money, for example. Same for education systems, politics, the opposite sex or anything else. Focus on reality and then learn to navigate it.

This sounds absurdly obvious when written down, but is often overlooked.

Many instead whine about the conditions. They dedicate their lives to changing them instead of studying and mastering them.

Conditions are complex, not easily altered. Campaigns against capitalism are a common example. In Western nations relatively free markets have elevated us above everyone. Alternative systems, like centrally-controlled economies, have done the opposite. They sound good on paper but repeated attempts over the last century have demonstrated socialist systems lead to collapse as government grows to colossal proportions and loses sight of what ordinary people want.

In the West our periods of most dramatic growth were times when government was small or otherwise constrained and people were free to pursue their aims relatively unhindered. In other words, times when they had few defined “rights” but like now, lots of opportunity.

The able exploit reality, whatever it looks like. The less able complain and imagine something better, and the truly lost become enamoured with their fantasy worlds inside their heads and reject reality altogether.

Socialism attracting bitter failures is an old observation, but an important one. All great causes do this. They provide cover for an inability to adapt to the world you actually live in and replace it with a fake one that feels better. I may have failed but I fought the good fight to rid us of capitalism, patriarchy and oppression.

This is the creed of derelicts everywhere, whatever the flavour of their delusion. They recoil from the work needed and instead embrace performative condemnation. Occupy Wall Street, a famous failure, is no different from today’s climate protests. Each attracts the hopeless and acts as a kind of energy sink to sap the impressionable of their vitality while they convince themselves they are making a difference, all the while nothing changes. Life rolls on regardless.

This is the fate of those who cannot master their reality. They become lost in a fantasy while reality unfolds around them, indifferent to your beliefs about how things ought to be.

Assess, then act

There are no rights, only artificial, temporary entitlements. These make you weak as you rely on others.

A better life is about assessing your world accurately, then acting on it. Success is about mastery of your world.

Those who seek rights doubly damn themselves. They become dependents of the powerful and they avoid cultivating the skills to survive, beginning with an accurate assessment of how life actually works.

Focusing on rights is usually disastrous for individuals. It retards development. You either spend your life defending some privilege or, worse, expend energy currying favour from the more able so you can join a privileged group.

Focusing on improving the world is only slightly better, but has the same failure rate. Local improvements are ignored in lieu of cosmic justice as a method to cushion the blow of your inadequacies.

Only acceptance and embracing works. Mastery must always be our goal, and that can only begin with adherence to reality, seeing the world as it really is.

This is the lesson:

• Reality > Causes and movements > Rights and entitlements

Reality is real. Focusing on mastering it pays actual dividends in a way nothing else can. It helps us spot opportunity. And it is those opportunities, if grasped, that provide the fighting chance we all have from time to time.

Take those chances and ignore the rightsmongers. No one owes you anything.

A sense of entitlement is the philosophy of slaves. Mental inadequates who retreat from challenges.

Slaves run nothing.

It is your choice whether to be in this category or not, and that begins by rejecting entitlement disguised as rights no matter how uncomfortable it makes you.

Build your own life, do it your own way, master your world and maybe then you will discover ways to live a good life. But one thing is certain you don’t have a right to it, you will have to work for it all.

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