@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

12.

One of the most interesting but largely unremarked and certainty not analysed everyday human behaviours is acting with a Sense of Entitlement. Sometimes it is a very obvious behaviour, like pushing to the front of a queue or trying to beat you on the highway when the road is about to narrow; sometimes it is embedded in the culture as a privilege for the would be special, such as private clubs, VIP lounges, access to superior education; you often see it in groups of fashionable people and it is ubiquitous in teen culture; but in many people, in the downtrodden, it often comes across as stifled anger when they say things like “I have a right to my opinion”, “we are as good as they are”, whatever… On a mass scale it breeds redneck racism, religious persecution, jihad, alternative politics and correctness, consumerism, artistic taste and fandom, imposed sexual and other strict moralities and the power of propaganda, among other variants of dis-ease in the Climate of Lie we live in.

It doesn’t matter that the themes, motifs, banners, costumes, artifacts, ideas and issues that are used to build this complex emotional meme are all nonsense. What matters is the emotional release, the effortless capacity to self-deliver a moment of smug satisfactionthat this behaviour achieves, even when only in a thought, even in a minute gesture like a raised eyebrow of superiority and scorn.

I once observed at a dull party two plump north London princesses who obviously thought they were really somebodies but in reality were not attractive enough to have males slavering over them: they arrived, looked very obviously around and discovered no one important, then left. On their way out they used stabbing fingertips to push people they were walking straight through out of the way. Had they stayed, like countless snobs in every sphere, they would have been looking over your should while talking to you, desperate to find somebody more important. If you set these two girls down at a lousy party with their favourite pop star present they would be down on their knees worshipping his manhood but if the guy was a schoolmate with a Saturday job in Starbucks they would probably treat him like dirt. And somewhere between those extremes of subservient adoration and utter contempt lies all human behaviour whatsoever, alas, because we don’t understand what equality means.

I find it entertaining sometimes to listen to perfectly healthy young black guys with good looks, girlfriends and a wasted free education behind them, moaning about how white society robs them of opportunity. Or middle class women with unlimited budgets and domestic help from their truly downtrodden sisters, moaning about “the glass ceiling” at work. There is no glass ceiling for the filthy manual drudgery that most of the world’s males perform to survive, including white males in advanced countries. But then the moaners don’t want the fate of everyone else: they want to be special, which is entitlement speaking in its purest tone, as the twisted voice of grandiosity. Think of the once pretty TV newscaster who had years of celebrity and wealth out of looking good, now complaining that she’s been replaced by a younger model; think of the six million dollar a year black sportsman, still harping on about his childhood in the slums; think of the PR consultant who lives in a ten million house in the trendiest part of the city, moaning about how hard it is to get back where she belongs after taking time out to raise her own children. It’s a joke, frankly, entitlement, but it’s there in all of us when you look. Hell there’s even people reading this now who are furious that my tone seems to be “talking down” to them and that I’m not giving them any obvious opportunity to cloud everything over by arguing and asking clever questions…

The Mind (your mind, our minds, everyone’s mind), the mind adds something to everything it comes across. It isn’t the intellect in all its purity that does that; it isn’t our native curiosity; it’s The Mind, which is the sentinel, mouthpiece, PR spokesperson, stand-up comic and narrator for the tender parts of the ego, the megalomaniac, grandiose, thirsty, lusting, cruel, outward acting part, the one who’s always on patrol at the helm. Whatever it encounters it is thinking out loud: Am I getting my share? Am I high in the hierarchy? Am I being respected? Do they know who they’re talking to? I shouldn’t have to wait in line. Do I have enough (of the best) and with some to spare? How can I avoid any loss?

Notice the excessive use of the interrogative that The Mind makes. In fact it’s constantly asking aggressive questions. It can’t hear anything without adding a thumbnail to the file about it’s own status. In fact it never just hears anything pure and clear and it thinks everyone else is doing the same so when you ask them the time they fire back with “why?” instead of just telling you the time. Most people’s entire conversation, including the most elevated parts about poetry and metaphysics, is nothing more than an endless rolling cannon fire of vaguely aggressive interrogative burst where the only true purpose is to establish their importance or complain that you’re not respecting them enough. Unless you’re a hero to them, in which case they get down on their knees and start praising you, much like the two young princesses at the second party. Even the greatest rebels bow to the Queen and show subservience to the great Captains of the economy or the Stars of screen and stage…

So, you talk to people because you’re a gregarious ape who needs their tainted company and is vaguely hoping that one day you’ll see a gleam on insight in their eyes and hear the first faltering splutter of an original observation coming from their own true and creative and buried soul… What you should be listening to is not the shit they speak: language isn’t referential; the content barely mattersin a Climate of Lie. Listen instead to the true message contained in the voice tone: is it commanding and imperious with a gleaming hint of the charming ringmaster; is it commanding, aggressive and butch like a tough guy who isn’t sure of himself; is it thin and precisely cutting and very very factually correct, a style used by would-be dominant women and middle strength men who don’t have the pure charm of the powerful or the gorgeous; is it apparently good natured but actually monotonous, repetitive and self-obsessed; is the speaker trying to smother you in a homely, condescending way; can you hear the many whining notes of protest, woven with Mozartian genius by the huge number of middle-ranking, middle-brow, middle income, ineffectual nobodies who are the backbone of our society? I know you can hear some voice tones, such as the corrupt obsequiousness of the swindling workman, the crushing overdrive of the charming salesman trapping you into yes at every turn, the nasty stench of threatening, jeering youth. Even you can hear the really obvious ones, so why not extend your range and start noticing the others? Why not stop answering like a frightened deer caught in the headlights of someone else’s interrogative? Why not stop playing the game of relationship negotiation and start responding to what the fucker is actually saying which is never anything more than “I am more important than you”, “I am more right than you are”, “I am complaining that you don’t give me the respect I deserve” or any one of a zillion variants of these themes.

Then remember that it’s not their fault because they too have spent their entire lives impaled on the interrogatives of parents, teachers, bosses, friends, lovers, and even strangers met at parties, all of them trying to impose their own sense of entitlement over the top of yours. That’s human life as it is lived, folks. Very little else is going on. The rich tapestry of infinite entertainments is just a side effect of the fact that no plain truth ever comes from our souls, spoken with real love and genuine respect for the being of the other. It just can’t happen the way the world is now. Everything is doomed to be a muted, second hand conflict of allergic reacting egos, no matter how large or small the stage on which it is played out from the US presidential election to the murmur of a lover who isn’t in the mood for sex right now. You are simply not allowed to be straight with anyone about anything and you can absolutely guarantee, whatever they claim, that they don’t know how to be straight with you.

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