Re: Wisconsin vs Total Recall
It seems to me that calling any generation "entitled" is, well, kind of silly. the sense of entitlement cuts across generational lines.
We have hard-working people of humility and gratitude of all generations here.
I'd suggest that a sense of entitlement is a sort of developmental disorder....it's expected in children as part of their maturation process, but then people are supposed to grow out of it once they mature. There are powerful cultural forces from which stem great pressure for people permanently to remain in a state of adolescence and never to mature into adulthood, no matter how many years they live.
I have a title and outline for a book called The Idolatry of Me which I'll probably never have the time to flesh out. I'd identify three different strands that combine to give us such an expanded sense of entitlement in so much of the population.
> see Tibor Scitovsky's brilliant book, The Joyless Economy, for the backstory. Basically, a sense of entitlement grows from sophisticated marketing, "buy our product because you are special and deserve it." Marketers today shrewdly use pscychological insights to expand purchases of their products, and so a sense of entitlement is an outgrowth of a consumer-driven capitalist economy. People can never achieve satisfaction through consumption, and yet they have an inner yearning for something with which to fill their lives with meaning, and so they get stuck like the squirrel in the cage, running and running and running yet never getting anywhere....but they sure do look good doing it, no?
> the success of progressivism as a political movement. An "unintended consequence" of a praiseworthy impulse, taken beyond a reasonable level to an extreme that is now a serious problem for us all. We call it "entitlements" after all! I do not fault the generous and caring impulse of progressivism, in fact I share it. However, if you look at all our essential rights, they are all intangible: right to worship freely, right to speak freely and peacably assemble, right to jury of peers, etc. The only right to a tangible thing is the right to bear arms. It's great to say that people should have basic nutrition and basic shelter; the problem arose when we used government power to provide that to people. Once people discovered a "right" to be fed or a "right" to be housed, it removed the basic necessity of earning it, either through hard work or collaboration. is it any surprise that we now find a widespread sense of entitlement that cuts across generational lines, based on dependency rather than age?
> the influence of a subset of atheists (not all of them). They claim not to believe in a Deity, but they are fooling themselves, in fact they believe that they themselves are God and delight in self-worship...."look at me, look at me, look at me, aren't I wonderful? watch my reality show, read my blog, me, me, me!!!"
).