Anger in the Age of Entitlement
Living in the Wrong Part of the Brain
They called the time of my early childhood the “Age of Anxiety.” In the 1950s, scientists churned out new forms of destruction measured in “megatons.” We practiced crouching under school desks, heads covered with bony arms—a maneuver designed to keep us safe in a nuclear attack. We feared communism, demagogues, the “yellow peril,” polio, genetic mutation, overpopulation, and juvenile delinquency. Our anxiety came from threats that were faceless, formless, and impersonal, hovering just outside the flickering gray lights of our new TV sets.
The national media touted a second Age of Anxiety after September 11, 2001, pointing out that people drank more, upped their medications, bought elaborate security systems, and more frequently visited therapists and places of worship. The causes of this new anxiety, like that of the 1950s, were also impersonal, formless, and pervasive but decidedly different. To understand the difference, recall your gut reaction to the color of the daily terror alert level during the Bush administration—the equivalent of making school kids hide under their desks to avoid nuclear destruction. Was your reaction to the terrorist threat level anxiety or resentment? Did you feel the government was trying to protect you or exploit you?
In fact, the anxiety in post-9/11 America was mostly hidden, because we had learned to cover it up with resentment. The formula for resentment is any vulnerable emotion—anxiety, guilt, shame, fear, and so on—plus blame. If you blame your emotional discomfort on someone else, you gain the temporary advantage of self-righteousness—“I’m right; you’re wrong” (“Mine!” “No!”). You get a small dose of adrenaline that gives temporary energy and confidence, although the latter is due to the oversimplified thinking that comes with adrenaline.
The emotional state you are likely to see most in an ordinary day is some form of resentment—an “attitude,” sense of entitlement, complaining, whining, criticizing, or devaluing. Our perceived threats are no longer formless and anonymous. They cut us off on the highway or disregard, overcharge, disrespect, or try to control us; they’re unfair, inconsiderate, and incompetent.
What happened between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 that masked anxiety with a veneer of resentment? The Culture of Toddlerhood eased into our consciousness through the back door of innovation:
These were fertilizers for the Culture of Toddlerhood. But the main nourishment came later, from constant mobile connection to the Internet and related media, including social media. No wonder that under stress we’re apt to become like toddlers in a supermarket.
Toddler Brain Culture
Although most self-defeating emotional habits were initially formed in toddlerhood, they would probably do little damage were they not so vigorously reinforced by pervasive cultural influences. When an entire culture promotes living and loving in the wrong part of the brain, we can hardly escape toddler dialogues of “Mine!” and “No!” or ignore politicians who sound like stubborn toddlers overstimulated by a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Nor can we elude continual power struggles, overreactions (temper tantrums), and resentful pouting, which make us respond with powerless frustration or, worse, react in kind.
Many factors contribute to the Culture of Toddlerhood. Below are the chief ones:
Entitlement
Though far from perfect, developed societies are now more egalitarian, with more individual rights shared by wider and more diverse segments of populations than ever before in human history. If our culture was dominated by the Adult brain, it would marry the emergence of more rights with greater responsibility, in recognition that the two are morally inseparable. For example, we have a right to vote and a responsibility to learn as much as we can to make an informed decision, based on the best interests of the community or country. We have a right to speak and a responsibility to listen. We have a right to argue and a responsibility to observe personal boundaries. In fact, all our rights entail the responsibility to respect the rights of others. Yet the Culture of Toddlerhood places so much emphasis on rights and entitlement (“get your needs met”) that it divorces rights from responsibility.
Without responsibility, the perception of rights swells to a sense of entitlement—the belief that you have the right to do or get something and that your right is superior to the rights of those with different perceptions. When you feel entitled, you’re not merely disappointed when others disagree or fail to accommodate your presumed rights; you feel cheated and wronged. The “unfair” response of others provides a stronger sense of entitlement, now with demands for compensation: “You owe me!” (“Mine!”). Of course, once you’re older than four and not so cute anymore, the world is unlikely to meet your entitlement needs. Adults in the Toddler brain fall into a downward spiral. The more they don’t get what they think they deserve, the more justified they feel in demanding compensatory privilege, also perceived as “rights.” The person who cuts in front of you in line is often saying, “With the way I’ve been treated, I shouldn’t have to wait in line, too!” Not surprisingly, criminals, domestic violence offenders, emotional abusers, and aggressive drivers have been shown in research to have a strong sense of entitlement.
Entitlement, Stress, and Anger in the Culture of Toddlerhood
It’s no accident that the new sense of entitlement engendered by the Culture of Toddlerhood corresponds with the sharp increases in anger, resentment, and stress, which some researchers describe as epidemic. The more rights we perceive to be free of responsibility, the more we’re bound to perceive that those rights are being violated. The mere possibility of rights infringement causes anger and stress.1 If you think you’re stressed all the time, thank the Culture of Toddlerhood for stimulating survival-level responses to petty ego offenses.
1 It takes passion and commitment to achieve rights, but these give way to anger and aggres-sion when the rights we already have seem violated.
It’s easier than you might think to construe ego offenses as survival threats. To begin with, the anger and stress hormones stimulated by ego injury are the same components of the primitive fight/flight/freeze reflex common to all mammals. Activation of fight/flight/freeze requires a dual perception of threat and vulnerability. When they are more vulnerable—exposed, wounded, starving, sick, or recently traumatized—animals respond to lesser threats with greater anger, fear, or submission. The activation of fight over flight/freeze is determined by the perceived annihilation potential of the threat. A raccoon will ferociously fight a rat to defend her newborn kits but not a cougar. More anger is observed in powerful animals, which tend to be predatory. Powerful animals use anger to acquire and defend territory and resources, thereby reducing threats to survival.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and the Ego
Social animals, whose limbic systems differ little from that of toddlers, have to make choices about where to go, when to sleep, who eats what and how much, and who mates with whom. Lacking sophisticated language to negotiate and collectively strategize, the pack must develop some kind of executive function to make choices. Most social animals, including humans, answer this challenge by organizing into hierarchies, in which individuals achieve rank. Ascending up the hierarchy increases status, along with access to resources, with the most status and resources bestowed on a chief executive: alpha males or matriarchs. To establish rank and executive function, social animals invoke the old fight/flight/freeze reflex. Since the threat of annihilation is lowest for the more powerful animals, they can afford more anger in competition for the top of the hierarchy. For the less powerful, submission or flight makes sense. In social animals, anger goes to the powerful, fear and submission to the less powerful. (Humans typically experience the submissive impulse as shame.) We know that the central nervous systems of all animals seek equilibrium; they can take just so much anger, fear, and shame. Solitary animals achieve equilibrium by isolation, social animals by acceptance of their place in the hierarchy.
With the development of the prefrontal cortex in humans came self-consciousness and the incorporation of status into the emerging sense of self or ego. Humans became creators of value. Status was no longer merely a means of access to resources, it became a separate entity, a “value of the self.” This new estimation of the self as important brought with it a sense of entitlement to receive value from others, in the form of social approval (respect and admiration), as well as larger shares of resources.
Throughout the vast majority of human history, individual ego among the masses was suppressed by powerful members of the hierarchy through the use of force, dogma, and tradition. Only chiefs, kings, noblemen, priests, husbands, and parents could have big egos, assert entitlement, and express anger. What we call “human rights” began a slow emergence a few hundred years ago. But in the last sixty years the trend has accelerated sharply toward more enlightened, egalitarian cultures. We now recognize that everyone has equal value. Children are as valuable as parents; wives are equal to husbands; ordinary citizens are equal to heads of state; dark-skinned and light-skinned, patients and doctors, educated and noneducated, unpublished and published writers . . . all are equally valuable and entitled.
Unfortunately, status and the sense of entitlement that go with it were incorporated into the development of ego so long ago in human history that it’s difficult to imagine value in terms of equality, except in an abstract or philosophical sense. Although we know better in the Adult brain, we assume in the Toddler brain that our rights are superior to those of other people. The inevitable negative response from others stimulates more anger, resentment, rudeness, and stress hormones. When the vulnerable ego feels threatened, the expression of opinions becomes opinionated and analysis gives way to confirmation bias at best, or, at worst, to dogma.
The perception of entitlement has soared exponentially with the Internet. Blogs, e-mails, social media, and interactive platforms seem to make everyone’s opinions equally valuable, without regard to facts, truth, or morality. To get attention, the entitled individual almost has to develop a “Mine!” and “No!” approach to everything. Polarization, fueled by Toddler brain splitting (all good or all bad, all black or all white), has taken over the media and, by extension, political discourse. Angry, resentful, contentious, and rude e-mails, blogs, and tweets—like heavily negative political campaigns and governmental gridlock—are certain to get worse until we change the Culture of Toddlerhood.
I doubt that humans will ever decouple status from ego and achieve a totally egalitarian culture or a significantly less rude Internet. But we can come closer by drawing self-value from fidelity to our deepest values, including a sense of basic humanity, which we explore later in the book. Then we’ll require less status-
embedded value from others. Our egos will become less vulnerable, and defending them will be less necessary. We’ll learn from other perspectives and enjoy the accretion of knowledge yielded by disagreements about evidence, concepts, and use of language. We’ll escape the endless iterations of toddler coping mechanisms that cause us to make the same rude, tiresome, and harmful mistakes over and over. We’ll enjoy the benefits of a well-developed Adult brain with a strong sense of responsibility for regulating Toddler brain entitlement.
Self-Obsession
In the beginning of the reality-show era of television, the rampant self-obsession on display was probably just the result of real people (non-actors) pretending to be real people for the camera. Marketers quickly learned that over-the-top self-obsession attracts viewers. The rest is history, as life has a way of mimicking art. For a lot of people, it’s cool to think and act like reality show characters who are as fascinated with themselves as toddlers staring at a mirror. Many of my clients have revealed in therapy that they imagine themselves on camera several times a day. In the Culture of Toddlerhood, we can easily make our lives into a series of reality shows and become trapped, like a deer in the headlights, by the glare of our imagined reflections.
It’s been argued that part of the popularity of reality shows is due to a kind of negative modeling—we don’t want to be as self-obsessed as the players who fill our various media screens. If this is true, it’s just another form of Toddler brain reactivity. But for it to be true, we would have to discount the marketing research behind the commercials that finance these shows, all of which promote various expressions of self-obsession.
Ironically, the Culture of Toddlerhood fixates on happiness as a primary objective, when nearly all its messages are of self-obsession and “getting your needs met.” As we’ll see in a later chapter, research on happiness shows that self-awareness, balanced with mindfulness of the environment and meaningful interactions with others, bring happiness, while self-obsession destroys it.
Splitting
Toddler brain splitting is a binary, all-or-nothing way of experiencing the world. It casts others as all good or all bad, with no shades of gray. At work it can take these forms: “You’re either for me or against me” (meaning complete agreement or submission) and “My way or the highway.” In love relationships, it sounds like, “Sometimes I love you, sometimes I hate you.”
The Cult of Feelings
Much of pop culture tacitly assumes that how you feel is who you are. We live in a “cult of feelings,” where what we feel has become at least as important as what we do. Think of all the news interviewers who shove microphones in the faces of politicians, perpetrators, and victims alike to ask the overwhelming question, “How do you feel?” We give more importance to personal feelings than personal values and to expressing how we feel rather than doing what we deeply believe is right. Tragically, we’re preoccupied with blaming negative feelings on others rather than healing the hurt that causes them. A hallmark of our toddler culture is victim identity. A plethora of media talk and call-in shows seduce us into prolonging feelings of injury to illustrate how badly others have treated us. Like lawyers for the plaintiff, we try to prove damages, as if our suffering would hold offenders accountable, or healing and growing would let them off the hook. The cruel cost of victim identity is a perception of the self as damaged, which lowers the likelihood of healing and growth.
The cultural reinforcement of entitlement, self-obsession, and the cult of feelings creates three self-perpetuating trends that damage the human. In the first, people perceive themselves as entitled to express every feeling they have, almost completely disregarding the effects on others, just as they felt entitled to litter a few decades ago and to smoke in public buildings a few years ago. The result is a culture that elevates superficial feelings over the deeper value of relationships. Negative feelings are almost always received more negatively than those expressing the feelings intend, especially in close relationships. (“I feel you’re ignoring me” is bound to get a defensive response.) Because negative feelings are more contagious and prone to reciprocation than positive feelings, adults trapped in the Toddler brain will most likely get negative responses to their expressions of entitlement. In the fog of self-obsession, negative reactions to their negative expressions make them feel like victims, with the right to retaliate.
The second disastrous result of the entitlement/self-obsession cult of feelings juggernaut is that people now feel entitled not just to the pursuit of happiness, not even just to happiness, but to feeling good most of the time. If you don’t feel good, something must be wrong with you or your relationships. This cult of feeling good has led many people to develop acute intolerance for the vulnerable feelings that are a necessary part of life and love. Worse, they feel entitled to demand that others regulate the discomfort they can’t tolerate. “You have to make me feel good” has become the subtext of a great many interactions. In the Culture of Toddlerhood, feeling bad is no longer motivation to heal, correct, and improve. It’s a violation of rights.
Intolerance of Disagreement and Uncertainty
Prong three of the hellish triad of entitlement, self-obsession, and cult of feelings is that so many people now perceive themselves to have the right to control what others think and say. This trend started out justly enough in attempts to combat plagues of racism, sexism, ageism, and so forth. But the Culture of Toddlerhood inflated it, first to political correctness then to the current state of utter intolerance of disagreement. Slapping an “ist” or “ism” on other people’s thoughts and expressions gives us the right to dismiss what they say and devalue them personally. In the extreme, the wisdom of every author before the age of political correctness can be facilely disregard as some kind of “ist.” I recently saw a post accusing an author of sexism for using the word master, which the commenter regarded as patriarchal. I suppose the commenter wanted millions of women to surrender the master’s degrees they’ve worked hard to earn, so as not to contribute to sexism.
To justify the “right” to devalue, all we have to do is claim to feel “offended.” In the Toddler brain, the easily offended have become “ismists,” ever ready to blame others for the chronic resentment that comes from their inability to control what other people think, say, and do.
Intolerance of disagreement ultimately rises from the dread of uncertainty. If we can tolerate it, uncertainty drives us to learn more, accomplish more, and connect to one another; it will make us smarter and more compassionate, as long as we can tolerate it. But the Toddler brain cannot tolerate uncertainty, because it provokes too much anxiety. (What you don’t know might offend you.) Experiments show that anxious people have a lower tolerance of ambiguity and are more likely to miss nuances of information and perceptions, not because they’re less intelligent or less sensitive or more prejudiced, but because they are more anxious. Calm the anxiety and they do much better in all areas. All of us, at one time or another, have reacted to uncertainty not by learning and connecting, but by trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Instead of viewing uncertainty as a useful friend, we vainly try to deny or avoid it with dogma, superstition, delusions, drugs, ego, attempts to control the environment and the people in it, perfectionism, and anger.
Life can be hard for those who cannot tolerate uncertainty. Reality simply won’t cooperate with their conception of it. But life can also be exciting and filled with value for those who embrace its inherent uncertainty.
Substituting Power for Value
Much of the psychological suffering in the world comes from substituting power for value. When they feel devalued, many people mistake the decline in energy and well-being that results from a deflated ego with physical threat. The adrenaline and cortisol stimulated by physical threat, even when erroneously perceived, make them feel temporarily more powerful and primed to exert power, either overtly or passively. A lot of the excess cortisol typically blamed on “stress” comes from Toddler brain egos perceiving continual threat and insult.
TV and movie screens are rife with displays of aggression in response to petty ego offenses. You can hardly watch an episode of a drama, comedy, or reality show without seeing this type of aggression. Nowhere is there a model of what every person needs to know: when feeling devalued, we must do something that makes us feel more valuable, not more powerful.
To make ourselves feel valuable under stress requires that we systematically convert Toddler brain feelings into Adult brain values, the topic of the next chapter.