Leo R. Sandy

Bob Meade, a prolific letter writer to the Laconia Daily Sun, just sent me an interesting article entitled "Entitlement versus enterprise" written by Dr. Joel Wade, a prosperous family therapist who writes with a conservative bent. Wade’s basic premise that people should be more self-reliant and less dependent on others is quite supportable. However, he engages in dualistic thinking whereby he describes self-sufficiency and enterprise as conservative traits and entitlement and laziness as liberal characteristics. Perhaps coming from a privileged position makes it easy for him to make such a distinction.

Certainly it is hard to disagree with his position that “Gratitude, forgiveness, optimism, integrity, engagement, benevolence… are… qualities and practices that are at once virtuous and personally fulfilling” and that “holding a grudge, dwelling on the negative, ruminating about past troubles, being undependable and dishonest, and indulging in a sense of helplessness are at once vices and personally destructive”. It is also very understandable that people raised in nurturing families and taught in good schools would be upbeat, engaged and grateful.

But what about those children whose lives have been marked by abuse, neglect, indulgence, oppression, racism and classism? Should they just say no to these and they will just go away? When specific groups of people are denied housing, jobs and health care because of their income, race, age or class, should they just should say, “no problem” and get on with their lives? Adversity can and does build character but it can also beat people down and make them not want to get up, especially if they have had a few hundred years of such experiences. I wonder how enterprising white people would have been if the dominant culture preached that “the only good white man is a dead one”.

Psychological research studies indicate that people can get so demoralized and down on themselves that they create self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, if groups of people are told that they are dumb, lazy, irresponsible and shiftless, many members of those groups will internalize these qualities and live them out as if they were true. There are numerous studies that indicate that expectations from others can strongly influence behavior. For example, the “Rosenthal Effect” has been demonstrated in many studies on teacher expectations. If a teacher is told that a student is either bright or cognitively limited, s/he will treat that student accordingly. If s/he also believes that members of minority groups are inferior, s/he will treat those students likewise. Many African-American and American Indian students are still viewed as inferior based upon the old theory of biological determinism. In one study based on social class, it was found that as minority students gain more middle class characteristics, their IQs actually surpass those of whites. This implies that greater access to the middle class will create more enterprise. When minority students are raised in minority neighborhoods, their self-esteem tends to be higher than when they are raised in mixed neighborhoods. While some may see this as a rationale for segregation, I see it as an indication that there is less acceptance in the general population and this translates into denied opportunities for many who try to leave their neighborhoods. One can point to the success of Tiger Woods or Oprah Winfrey as indications of acceptance but these people are hardly representative of African Americans. It is also inappropriate to generalize from a small statistical sample.

Wade acknowledges that children who do not grow up in a nurturing family can develop learned helplessness by which they do not believe in their own abilities. But then Wade retreats from this statement and makes the huge leap of blaming the political left for creating this learned helplessness that leads to a sense of entitlement. From my experience in the field of parenting and parent education, raising children to just be enterprising and nothing else has its limitations. In his article, "Parenting, prosocial behavior, and political attitudes", Paul Mussen reported that conservative parents tend to stress conventional and approved behavior, conformity with authority, and making good impressions on others while liberal parents emphasized the development of independence (self-reliance), personal responsibility and emotional control. Liberal parents who raise children with prosocial values tend to use an authoritative approach (balancing demands with support) as opposed to an authoritarian approach (high demands with low support). Liberal parents have also been shown to be warm, empathic, and sensitive, have high expectations, use more reason in discipline, model prosocial values, and encourage service to the family, neighborhood and society.

In my experience, I see the greatest sense of entitlement expressed by spoiled children, large corporations and the military. Spoiling children has nothing to do with left wing politics. It is done mostly by parents of means, and since spoiling encourages narcissism and discourages service, it is hardly a left wing approach. When large corporations go belly up, they feel entitled to be bailed out by the government, and they are. Also, corporate welfare represents a far greater expenditure of public funds than that which is given to poor single mothers. I doubt that these companies are headed by left wingers. The military, according to the Libertarian Party, is a huge government program. Because we live in a society that feels entitled to use up 40-percent of the world’s resources when we only have 5-percent of the world’s population, we have to support a powerful military to be able to take what we want in the world. This military also feels entitled to state of the art weapons (compare that with an adequate education standard). By contrast, many people who have come to a sense of learned helplessness tend to experience what are called “hidden injuries of class” and “internalized oppression” whereby they expect to be treated badly by those in authority, feel they deserve nothing and engage in self-deprecating self-talk and behavior. These are the people for whom the left advocates and the right chides.

It’s easy to view the world from the perspective of white privilege but it’s another thing to live in the world without it. Wade sits on his high chair and relies on a perverted notion of free will. Perhaps he believes that there is no injustice in the world and that all these people who are suffering are just whining. Wade could learn a lot if he spent some time where real people live and work instead of in his office where he handpicks clients with good insurance policies. He clearly represents a conservative view that all people who have hard luck are lacking in enterprise or good genetic makeup. If we want people to rise to the occasion and be enterprising, we have to give people a hand up rather than a hand out. There is a difference and this difference is lost on a lot of conservatives.

If conservatives are really serious in developing less entitlement and more enterprise among the downtrodden, then they should be very active in promoting good job training that helps meet the demands for more electricians, plumbers, machinists, nurses etc. They should also work to end racism, sexism, ageism and classism in society because these create barriers for people who want to develop enterprise and be less dependent on society. They should also work to fund high quality and affordable child care centers so that single mothers can go to work and not have to yield all of their paychecks for this service.

It seems that it’s a lot easier and cheaper to blame the victims than to work on their behalf. Personal responsibility and government assistance are not mutually exclusive. We must seriously examine the factors that undermine personal responsibility and carefully craft government programs and assess them for their effectiveness.

(Leo R. Sandy is professor of counselor education at Plymouth State University and a consulting school psychologist.)