WE'RE ENTITLED

When I first arrived in Los Angeles many years ago, I worked the usual assortment of odd and rather shitty jobs that entertainment industry wannabees take while trying to break in to the business. My favorite of all of these by far was a security gig I worked at gated community on the bluffs of Zuma Bay, in Malibu. The community had a busy main entrance which handled a lot of traffic in and out all day and night long; it also had a much smaller back entrance right by the beach, which almost nobody used, and I had a the four to midnight shift there.

It was a mindless dead-end job, low paying but easy to perform and very nearly hassle-free. I say “very nearly” because sometimes celebrities of dubious sobriety, manners or mental state would appear and make difficulties – my boss Jesse had a running feud with Pierce Brosnan, Sharon Stone was on the “do not admit” list, and Martin Sheen would occasionally appear, addled and carrying a cowbell. Also, because people who can afford to live in 2.5 million-dollar townhouses overlooking the Pacific often carrying with them a tremendous sense of entitlement, a kind of feudal mentality which allows them to look at those of lower economic status as serfs, peasants, or even slaves, albeit of the “wage” variety.

One afternoon in the summer three residents came bicycling up the road to the gate. Instead of using the cyclists' entrance, which had to be unlocked, they simply waited until a car went through, and then tried to shoot in after it before the swing-arm came back down. Big mistake. The automatic arm came down and very neatly clotheslined the last person in the group, a college-age female. She went down so hard that I ran over immediately, assuming she'd been knocked unconscious. In fact she was only stunned and extremely embarrassed. Being a resident, she knew, as did her two friends, that “rushing the gate” was not only stupid but dangerous, and in fact the victim was very humble. She asked my name, introduced herself, apologized, declined my offer of an ambulance, and peddled off, obviously wishing to leave the humiliating incident behind her. Her two friends were not so contrite. In fact, they tried pretty hard to find a way to blame me for the incident: one kept pointing out how dangerous the gate was, as if I had built the fucking thing. When I finally replied, “Yeah, it is dangerous, that's why you're not supposed to rush it,” she turned bright red. Her friend was even more obnoxious, making vague legalistic-sounding threats under her breath until I reminded her that the HOA considered “rushing the gate” a serious violation of the covenant and subject to punishment by heavy fines on the family in question. That did the trick. Both women left in a huff, convinced that the disaster had been anyone's fault but their own, and even more impressively, having learned nothing whatsoever from the incident. It is interesting to note that the only person who was actually hurt in this scenario was also the least angry about it.

It so happens that people reveal themselves in small ways, and the way folks treat a stray dog begging for food or a waiter who has gotten the order wrong can tell you as much or more about them as any resume ever could. As a $10/hr security guard in Malibu, I was a maybe a half-step above the “sandwich expert” at your local Subway in terms of social prestige; so when a wealthy person made a bad decision and suffered equally negative consequences for it in my presence, it was only natural that her two friends would try to shunt those consequences onto me. They felt entitled to do it. In a sense, that was what I was there for: to serve as a kind of dumping ground for the bad moods of those above me. Shit flows downhill, and it flows faster and heavier from rich folks than it does from any people on the planet Earth. Trust me, I know: I once worked a summer at a country club.

After I had broken into the entertainment industry, I began to find myself working on set or location for various television shows. Contrary to popular belief, shooting episodic television is neither glamorous nor sexy nor particularly exciting. What it is is very damned hard work, and most of the people involved in it are hardened professionals who do their jobs efficiently and well. But there are exceptions, and those exceptions are always from the uppermost rungs of the Hollywood pecking order: I have seen some directors and first A.D.'s throw childish temper-tantrums because they didn't get what they wanted, and nobody said a thing – nobody dared. I have also seen a few stars behave the same way, and again, nobody said a word. But except for a young stuntman who didn't know any better, I have never seen anyone from the rank and file behave in an egregiously entitled manner – and this fellow was promptly crushed flat by his boss, the stunt coordinator. The unspoken message is always clear: the middle and lower classes of Hollywood are not entitled to behave badly, but the upper crust can do what it wants: they are entitled. And what is Hollywood but a mirror of American society generally?

A sense of entitlement is a fascinating thing. We all have one about something, in some cases several somethings, but what we feel entitled to varies enormously from person to person and class to class. A poor person in York, Pennsylvania feels entitled to live in Section Eight housing and collect welfare. A rich person in Malibu, California feels entitled to place the blame for their own actions on a person of lower economic status. But what about the middle class? Well, when I was working in Rockville, Maryland, back in the winter of 2003 – 2004, a woman whose area code was no better than mine rang me up demanding that I send snow plows to her house immediately.

“Ma'am,” I said politely. “This here is the Department of CORRECTIONS. We deal with criminals. What you want is the Department of Transportation. They plow the roads. The number there is--”

“I DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHO YOU WORK FOR!” She screamed. “I WANT THAT SNOW PLOWED RIGHT NOW! NOW, DAMMIT, OR I'LL HAVE YOUR JOB!"

This kind of abuse is suffered daily, and in some cases hourly, by many people in public service, but what struck me about it was not only the stupidity of the woman in question, or her childish attitude, but the fact that making an error – calling the wrong department of county services – actually made her feel angrier and more entitled than she had been before. If she wanted snow plows a moment ago, she wanted them all the faster now that she had been exposed as dialing the wrong number. Like the girls who rushed the barrier, being caught in error by a person of inferior social status (a public servant is always of inferior social status, even if he makes more money than you) only heightened this woman's sense of arrogance. This reaction was caused partly by embarrassment, but at the core of it is expectation. More precisely, it is caused by a confusion between what we think are entitled to versus what we have a right to actually expect.

I once read a book on Zen Buddhism in which the writer explained that frustration came in two forms, legitimate and illegitimate. The legitimate form occurs when our expectations are reasonable, but are nonetheless unmet – if we don't get our paycheck after a hard week's work, for example. Unreasonable frustration, on the other hand, occurs when our expectations are both unreasonable and unmet: if we buy a lottery ticket and don't win, to become angry is simply an act of foolishness.

Entitlement is a very similar phenomenon, but a little subtler, because to be entitled does not mean possessing entitlements. The definition of “entitlement” is actually “the fact of having the right to do something,” and we do have many rights, both under God, the law, and also as consumers and customers. I pay Burbank Water & Power to provide me with electricity, and I therefore feel entitled to have lights on in my home, but this feeling doesn't make me entitled. A feeling of entitlement would be to expect my power to continue flowing even if I stopped paying my bills, or if the neighborhood was struck with a power outage.

When you think about it, much of the disgusting behavior that occurs in life comes from this confusion between what we want and expect, and what we're actually entitled to. Snobbery usually manifests as a feeling that one person is superior to another person based on their education, income or lineage and therefore has additional rights, rights reserved exclusively for them. What is sometimes referred to as “rape culture” probably stems directly from the idea that a man is entitled to sex with any woman he chooses, which is obviously not a reasonable expectation. Even racism and bigotry could be considered twisted forms of entitlement, because both find their strongest roots in the feeling that this, that or the other group of people shouldn't have the same rights you do. European colonialism, Communist expansionism, religious primacy, American manifest destiny, fascist dreams of empire – all came from the false belief that one group has the right to rule over and exploit others.

The odd thing about a false sense of entitlement, however, is that while it can lead to truly monstrous behavior, there are actually times when it works for the benefit of everyone involved. Probably no one ought to expect modern civilization to work: it's so fragile, so badly organized, so ready to collapse at the slightest push, that we ought to go around in a kind of cringing, fatalistic daze, grateful that we have access to rubella vaccines and venti mocha lattes but also expecting that something will soon go catastrophically wrong and put us right back in the jungle where our ancestors lived. And yet we don't. In fact, we assume precisely the opposite, and not without some justification. As George Orwell quite rightly pointed out, during times of great crisis, during wars and disasters and pandemics and so forth, it is neither the rich nor the poor who tended to come to the front and restore the situation, but those from the middle class. The rich, he said, were too softened by luxury and decadence to get off their asses and exert themselves, and too stupid to lead even if they'd had the impulse: they would be content for someone to come along and save them. The poor, on the other hand, were so emasculated and beaten-down by poverty and ignorance that they did not know how to lead and would not have known what to do had they been put in charge: they too would be content to wait for someone to tell them what to do. Only the middle class were perfectly placed to stand up and fix things, because they expected society to function, and felt entitled to its benefits: water flowing from taps, power plants generating electricity, trash being picked up, hospitals and school open, buses and trains running. They did not have mansions, but they had public utilities, and by God they were going to get them. Whether or not this sense of entitlement, this set of expectations, was reasonable or not, the middle class possessed it, and therefore always act upon it. It is worth noting that the great revolutionaries of history, both good and evil, were almost all exclusively products of the middle or merchant classes. When they felt the system wasn't working, they picked up guns and manifestos and tried to fix it the violent way.

When I look at America today, I am struck by the way that this particular sense of entitlement is both deepening among the middle class and at the same time fading away. The Millennial Generation is materialistically one of the best-off in human history, and therefore one of the most entitled-acting in its behavior: if you doubt this, take their wi-fi away, even for ten minutes. At the same time, they are far more self-conscious as a group of the threats facing the planet and the human race, and far readier to come to the fore and try to fix the situation, than their predecessors were: the very same feeling that causes this group to say things like “owning a cell phone is a human right” is also what makes them demand that we stop fracking, stop burning coal, stop driving gasoline-powered cars, and so on. There is a certain amount of evidence that we are already past the tipping point, environmentally speaking, that human civilization is ultimately doomed, and that no measures we are actually likely to take will have much effect in the long run. But Millennials nonetheless expect civilization to survive, so they jump into the process of saving it, or at least extending its life, and this is a positive thing.

It follows that in the history of humanity, many great triumphs – military, scientific, cultural, artistic – have been achieved not through our intelligence per se, but because the people involved simply felt entitled to win, and acted arrogantly and blindly upon that basis. This was as true of Julius Caesar as George Washington, of Michaelangelo as Thomas Edison. From an objective standpoint, and to bring this article full circle, I myself had almost no chance of successfully breaking into the entertainment industry when I got here. Almost everything was against me, including the cold hard odds. That I succeeded, at least enough to have made a living at it for a decade or more, probably speaks less of my intelligence than it does of my ego and my capacity for positive self-delusion. I felt that success in this town was and is my right. I still feel that way. It isn't logical, and there is much evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't make a difference to my outlook, because some small but indestructible part of me insists that I'm entitled to it. The laughable notion that Hollywood owes me something, that success is something I have a right to, keeps me going...and somehow, against all logic, also seems to keep my phone ringing.

It may be, in the grand scheme of things, that a sense of entitlement, as disgusting and annoying as it may be, is also a factor which in human affairs has been enormously underrated.