Entitlement Makes Lazy

Entitlement is the curse of everything being so easy you withdraw into safety as your spirit withers. Life is battle and to remain vivid you must be active to fight, feast, and further dreams into demonstrative proof.

Two forms of handouts prodigiously fail:

1. Vast wealth given to children without rigorous guidance (taking two generations to rise from poverty to wealth, then back to poverty in a generation)

2. Government handouts of taxpayer wealth to the poor (fueling expectation of endless freebies fused with envy and resentment)

Consider the entitlement of the college educated and white collar worker. Having achieved boring stability by completing courses or showing loyalty to an office environment by performing to expectations, they happily renounce curiosity for life and all will to do anything more interesting than dutiful labor and dulling entertainment.

In the most educated cities, you'll find no one with a thought or aspiration, only successful course takers. But ask them about shows and celebrities and you'll see them suddenly stir awake to tell you all about their deep resources of knowledge for diversions.

Schopenhauer diagnosed the problem of fixation on modernity and the costs incurred from breaking the continuity of culture and knowledge that span centuries.

Every thirty years a new generation appears which knows nothing and then sets about trying to gulp down summarily and as fast as possible all the human knowledge assembled over the millennia, after which it would like to think it knows more than all the past put together. To this end it resorts to universities and reaches out for books, and for the most recent ones too, as being its own contemporaries and fellows of its own age. Everything quick and everything new! as new as it itself is. And then off it goes, loud with its own opinions!

Focusing on the contemporary reduces the span of knowledge to the immediate, not only ignoring the best information and works, but also isolating efforts so none have forebears or any sense of a larger vision. All efforts become the trivial, a new ground floor built atop nothing, constructed from scraps rummaged on an island. Of course they are far inferior to what came before, though this is unknown by those surveying because have no sense of what came before -- they measure only against other inferior efforts.

Education usually goes wasted on inert spirits. Maybe it was always intended to be a throwing of seeds into the wind, knowing most would never take.

A spirit needs curiosity and interest to want to find what is possible, and then to achieve it.

A spirit needs a self-propelled engine to push onward despite circumstances, never pampered and rotting away in idleness. Sloth is a holy sin; you will soon be dead forever, and this is how you treat the gift of your one life ever?

College graduates are barely literate, repeating forms and ideas like robots, unable to critically examine ideas or form their own. The language and ideas they use are not even interesting to them, nor its potential. As a counterexample, a ninth grade dropout from the ghetto finds words interesting and plays with their structure and sounds for many years, figuring them out because he has an interest and enjoyment for knowledge of their possibilities.

He doesn't come up with Shakespeare, but we're not likely to get back to that level of culture given that hypermoderity leaves everyone isolated without any connection to the past. At best, he becomes a rap god creating a higher standard for rhymed word play.

If cornered, what college graduate or office worker could say something creative or interesting? What will the obedient middle class do when the abyss threatens to pull them down? Unfamiliar with action, they will let it happen while effetely wishing it wasn't.

Don't bring an iPhone to a late night alley assault.