Friday, September 13, 2019

A Recipe for Entitlement

Take one child and give him everything he could possibly want all his life. Make sure he never goes hungry and always has his needs met. Heap to him gifts of all kinds to please and entertain him. Never make him work for these things, but rather have them appear.

Give him an education that costs him nothing, but be sure not to give him a good understanding of how people of the past have lived or how unique his particular upbringing is in the grand scheme of human history. If he counts his blessings, let it be only once or twice a year and drown that out with food and entertainment and muffle it with repetition so that he need not take it too seriously. 

Surround him with other people who are similarly prosperous and be sure not to let him come in contact too often with those less fortunate. Let him make his friends from those who have also never had to go without. They will only convince him that prosperity is normal. 

From these formative experiences, he will almost certainly come to believe that the world he lives in is horrific when it fails to fulfill his least fantasy and this will leave him dissatisfied and depressed at the imperfections rather than grateful for what he has. 

Be sure to tell him he's wonderful and smart and informed as he is, and let him assume from this that he need not learn from his elders or study the past in order to learn from it. He's going to change the world, you see. Why would he need to know about the past? His elders obviously did it all wrong or else all the problems would have been solved by now. But he is better than they. He sees the imperfections they seem not to notice. Arrogance is as important as ignorance if you want a really fine case of entitlement. 

After this preparation, he will be ready to follow anyone who promises him one of his fancies and will, in pursuit of this purported improvement, think himself a very fine person to be changing the world in such a way. The sacrifices of the past that have placed him on this pinnacle will be unknown to him and thus unheeded. And in his ignorance, he will destroy all that has brought about his bountiful prosperity because he does not even know that it exists. It will be to him like water to a fish - just his normal habitat which is always there and which he never sees or thinks about.

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