The Age of Entitlement – Part 1

What Covid, I think, has revealed is that we now live in a dangerous age. The Age of Entitlement. An age where, consciously or otherwise, the majority of people in the developed world have adopted a state of total denial. Detached from reality. No longer do many accept or understand our quality of life – health, wealth and happiness – may be subject to risks beyond their control, or anyone’s for that matter.

In its place people have replaced objective reality with a new metaphysics where faced with such risks and adverse outcomes we claim they are in-fact ‘injustices’. Injustices that need to be at best prevented or at the very least compensated for by an ‘authority’. Whoever the crowd deems that to be.

Despite all the evidence throughout human history that our complex societies and interactions are subject to constant unforeseen uncertainties and risks we now want to insulate ourselves from them. Not all of them clearly. We understand our own personal choices have consequences and are subject to risk. For example, if we play the lottery we know we can’t ask for our money back if we lose. No, specifically this mass delusion only applies to risks and their negative impacts that are viewed as beyond our reasonable control.

It should be noted it is clear we have no issue with good luck. Rather the opposite in fact. When we incur good luck it is usually our desire to keep an authority – usually the tax man – as far from it as possible. But when faced with bad luck beyond our control we now demand as a right that we can export the problem and it’s costs elsewhere. We must not suffer as a consequence of it and someone needs to figure it out for us, thank you very much. How very postmodern of us.

Why is this a bad thing you may ask? Well if we can’t accept reality or simple truths then we cannot possibly hope to come together and formulate good responses to the problems we encounter. As Voltaire said “perfect is the enemy of the good”. An inability to accept that only imperfect outcomes exist – that we will incur a cost – results in a far more harmful outcome than what was possible. What Douglas Murray wrote in his book The Madness of Crowds could just as easily be applied to the Age of Entitlement, “it is a system that is not just unworkable but dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that are unachievable”. I’d go further to state that if the majority have fallen victim to this thinking, as I believe Covid has illuminated, it is so dangerous as to threaten our societies as we know it.

Given this could easily demand a book to even slightly begin to explain the various elements at work I recognise it’s tough to fully do it justice in a blog. I thought though I’d outline the headlines and the some evidence in the course of my first 5 blogs. I’ll split these as follows;

Part 1 – The Age Of Entitlement

How Covid has highlighted endemic entitlement

Part 2 – A Failure In Outcome

How our entitlement has distorted every aspect of our response and resulted in societies achieving highly adverse outcomes relative to what was possible

Part 3 – Beware Bad Actors

How key pillars of our societies – governments, political opposition and journalists – have failed to confront our denial. Instead by pursuing their own self-interest they have conspired unconsciously to create a ‘perfect storm’ that indulges our mass delusion.

Part 4 – Funny Money and a Perilous Path

How left unchecked the age of entitlement threatens our quality of life

Part 1 – The Age of Entitlement

Life is inherently complex, uncertain and unstable. Indeed the fact we live in an age where this is no longer seems to be fully understood or acknowledged is a testament to our success as societies. But as sure as night follows day the uncertainty remains. Covid is such an uncertainty. It is what Donald Rumsfeld would term a “known unknown”. A risk we can be certain will occur given their commonality in our past but we just can’t say when. A ‘When not if’ event.

Covid is nothing more than bad luck. While living in the most peaceful and prosperous time to have ever existed on earth a theoretical risk has become a reality. A risk event that fundamentally changes the ‘order of things’ has occurred. Yet, rather than understand this event in that context and accept it we apparently refused to and still refuse to. Rather than unlucky and to be best worked through we believe it to be unfair. As I’ll show this has been with devastating consequences for our response and future.

To begin to understand this a good analogy would be to imagine a football game in which your team concedes a freak goal owing to a gust of wind. Ultimately, you’d accept it. Frustrating, yes. Unlucky, very much so. Unfair? Not by a long shot. Why? Well any rational and objective person would concede the opposition didn’t control the wind and they got lucky. It’s not their fault. And to acknowledge this is crucial to progress.

By accepting the new reality your team will now focus their effort on the need to score two goals at the very least to win. One goal – the old solution – won’t cut it. A new problem exists to which a new solution is demanded. Nor will the solution be static, it should evolve with time and as the facts evolve. For example, if still one down with ten minutes to play you’d expect the team to employ a more gun ho approach to than if 80 minutes remained. Critically though for this process to begin this we must accept the nature and reality of the problem.

If your team were to refuse to accept its misfortune, choosing instead to perceive themselves as been wronged, then it will almost certainly result in them losing the match. By investing their time and effort in protest it won’t change reality one bit. Nothing in the rules of the game protect you from an ‘act of god’. No authority can overturn this ‘injustice’. The efforts would be futile and wasted. The preoccupation with protesting the situation will divert effort from attempting to find the solutions that could win the game in the only way possible – scoring more goals than the opposition. Denial compounds the problem faced. In the analogy the team that refuses to accept and move on is only going to make their situation worse most likely with a player getting sent off in frustration.

Covid was conceding such a freak goal in life. Unwanted, unwarranted and unfortunate. But it isn’t unfair. Yet far too many seem to think it is and that the score needs to be ‘corrected’ by an authority – in this case the government. Faced with something we don’t like we think we are entitled to the impossible. To face both no health or economic costs in this new reality.

Worse still we think the means to actually deliver it exist. A mass delusion that the rule book must, and does, provide such an authority not only with the means to act, but to act perfectly. Any failure to do so being only a question of competence and not of possibility. That’s what we think we are entitled to today. The existence of this mass delusion isn’t hard to see. It’s everywhere and has dictated almost every aspect of this pandemic and how we’ve reacted. I think deep down we all know it too.

For simplicity I’ll use the UK as the primary nation to evidence the situation. I’m British and it’s the situation I know most about. Let’s begin back in February and March. As the virus spread in the community across Europe our entire outcome apparently was determined on the basis whether we locked down one week earlier. When something sounds too good to be true it usually is.

Testing capacity was the next major ‘scandal’. If only the government had invested in a pandemic level of testing that was ready to go it would have been sorted, the bullet dodged. The cost to build and maintain this vast infrastructure awaiting a potential pandemic ignored by those who lamented the government. Why haven’t we developed an asteroid defence system yet then? Shouldn’t that too be a source of outrage by the same logic?

Even allowing for the idea that we should have had the laboratory capacity and infrastructure, people still seem unable to comprehend that when faced with a new virus it would still be relatively useless. As when a novel virus emerges we first need to develop a test to utilise this vast infrastructure too. In the case of Covid the virus was so infectious it simply was impossible to run fast enough to keep up with it. By the time we had determined a new virus even existed we then had to develop a test to identify it. This takes weeks. It is why Covid is a global pandemic that has reached Amazonian tribes and a virus like Ebola isn’t and hasn’t. We can get ahead of Ebola because transmission is not simple. The virus itself is the determining factor.

At almost every turn though the same delusion existed. The perfect was possible. That it hasn’t happened is due to incompetence. Take PPE and it’s shortage, another issue that dominated our headlines in the early stages of the pandemic. Why didn’t the government have mountains of the stuff ready and supply chains in place to make more at our command? Once again the cost to stockpile and replace what is a degradable product indefinitely is ignored. This isn’t to say nothing could have been improved on in how our Governments have acted (see part 2). It’s just to make the point that our general expectation was in utter fantasy land.

Fast forward a few months and the very people who bemoaned the failure of government to invest huge sums in vast pandemic response systems indefinitely in anticipation of an event that may not occur are now the same people outraged about value for money in government spending. You can’t make it up. They are unaware it seems of the scale of cognitive dissonance these positions entail. How much money would have been wasted building and maintaining mountains of PPE or a national testing capacity waiting for the known unknown to happen? It is truly staggering and it’s hard to explain how this remains unchallenged (but I’ll attempt to in part 3). The evidence that the impossible is what we are demanding abounds yet we collectively continue to insist it remains the art of the possible.

My personal favourite is that of first year students going to university who are outraged at their experience been far from ordinary and feeling shortchanged on their investment. They are suffering through virtual classes, food parcels from home and no freshers week. But what did they expect? Many of these people will have accepted places at the peak of the first lockdown. ‘Oh the government must have it sorted out by September. It’s months away. Plenty of time’. It wasn’t their responsibility to comprehend in a global pandemic events are somewhat fluid and uncertain, not least until a vaccine is found.

No. Their default expectation was that this has to be sorted out by the government in time for when it mattered for them. I’ll be kind and admit they probably went through quite a personal journey to come to terms with the need to wash their hands a bit more than they’d have ordinarily liked. They aren’t totally ignorant. If ever there was a year to take a gap year this was it. I understand that may not have been the plan. But that’s just it. Covid wasn’t in any of our plans. Deal with it.

It is almost universal though as I’ve shown. Students don’t deserve to be singled out. The monumental complexities of government restrictions are a product of trying desperately to accommodate as many of our subjective demands as possible. Our own endless lists of things we cannot accept being prevented from doing. ‘How is public transport safe but yet I can’t do X?’. Desperately they lurch from measure to measure trying to placate as many of us as possible, destined inevitably to fail as contradictions multiply and any semblance of coherence dies, unlike the virus.

Look now at the debate around Christmas. We live in a truly remarkable age. After months of seeking to limit the spread of the virus and countless draconian measures to that end, including lockdowns and the loss of fundamental civil liberties, we now face a unique problem. A national holiday that can’t be delayed. Our response? Can we accept that perhaps this year reality may demand we give it a miss? Oh no. We are entitled to Christmas. We want the virus to take a holiday because we want a holiday. After months of outrage about the government’s apparent failings to contain the virus we now insist on having an event that undoubtedly risks reinvigorating the transmission of the virus. If it does we’ll blame Boris of course. He should have told us we couldn’t – except we refuse to admit it.

It’s illogical. It’s wrong. It’s dangerous. In this state of denial we’ve demanded ever more action by authorities to try and deliver the impossible. Like the football team who can’t accept going one down we still haven’t. The clearest evidence of the harm this is that across the developed world we still have no recognisable strategy or goal. In business this may take the form of a profit or revenue target. A goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. What’s ours? What is our equivalent of now needing two goals to win the game? Without it we can’t ever hope to win.

On to part 2 – A Failure In Outcome