Entitlement or enlightenment: Which will it be?

Bitterness is the illusion that others cause our emptiness. Only human puppets choose their puppeteer. Why allow others to make us dance or shudder at their whim and pleasure? Emerson put it this way: "Why should the way I feel be determined by the thoughts in someone else's head?"

Here are two paths to disempowerment, to psychological castration, to the "illusion of injustice" in my dear father's phrase, to bitterness and to victim mentality.

Road No. 1 – External Locus of Control

Locus means location or place. So "locus of control" refers to where a person feels the factors of individual success and failure are generated. According to Julian Rotter's theory, locus of control is either internal or external. It is a continuum, not either/or, meaning that people adopt a combination of both. Those with an internal locus of control believe that factors like effort, competence and will are largely responsible for their life experience, good or bad. Those with an external locus of control blame their failures on outside factors like other people holding them down, racism, ageism, clowns lurking in bushes, homophobia, or bad luck.

Problems are often inner weakness disguised as external obstacles.

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If someone told you to hold the end of this cord, and I will vacuum your house, what would you think? First, is he crazy? Second, this vacuum needs electricity to work, not me pretending to be its source of power. Sounds silly, but it is exactly what we do when we expect others to make us happy, to direct our will, to improve our skills in the marketplace, to build the fortress of our character, and to make our relationship with God more intimate.

The sooner you blame other people, the more time they have to fix your problem. This is an external locus of control. It may sound like a joke, but it's the governing philosophy of victim mentality.

How do I say this politely? We are never a victim of a bad choice; we are victims only where no choice exists. A coworker once lamented that he feels like a slave at the job. I asked him what he had done today that was involuntary. He said, everything I do is voluntary. Then how can you be a slave? Think about it. Why the victim mentality? The demand for victim status exceeds the supply of tyranny.

Trigger alert for snowflakes: Being offended or insulted does not make you victims because your response is totally under your control.

Famed psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, while enduring horrendous slave labor and torture inside socialist Nazi concentration camps for three years, had an insight about being victimized. Frankl discovered that a space lies between stimulus and response, however brutal the conditions. "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. … Between stimulus and response there lies our growth and our freedom." This applies to both Viktor Frankl in Auschwitz and Dachau death camps and to shell-shocked snowflakes triggered by hearing words "free enterprise" or "pro-life" on a college campus.

An external focus of blame robs people of their vast inner resources of hope, courage, creativity and power. Victim mentality's big lie is that poverty in America is caused by external tyranny. As psychiatrist Dr. Abraham Low put it superbly, "Once you think of yourself as being a victim, you will not try to seek help from your inner environment, from yourself."

Road No. 2 – Entitlement Rather Than Enlightenment

A flower turns sunshine into blossom. Enlightenment turns your duty into joy. This is the pattern of growth: Look to whatever is outside so long as it helps you blossom. When the outer environment becomes hostile, look inside for development. From a beautiful poem by Rabindranath Tagore:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was duty.
I acted, and behold, duty was joy.

But others won't help me, don't care about me, won't give me anything – now what? The greatest danger to charity is not selfishness in the giver but entitlement in the receiver. Entitlement has an external locus of control; its delusion is that others are the real source of our prosperity and growth. By contrast, charity gains inner wealth by giving.

No one has the power to make your inner environment poor. Poverty does not cause inner squalor. Wealth of another does not dehumanize you. It is grotesque slander of the poor to imply that their rich inner life, spiritual depth and cultural dignity are tarnished by a lack of material wealth. This is why socialists are so threatened by another's religious liberty and focus entirely on the external needs of people. Even liberal-leaning Bertrand Russell saw this trap of external focus: "Socialism ... is too ready to suppose that better economic conditions will themselves make men happy. It is not only more material goods that men need, but more freedom, more self-direction, more outlet for creativeness, more opportunity for the joy of life, more voluntary cooperation and less involuntary subservience to purposes not their own."

In disheartening times, think of inner peace as charity that you give to yourself. Don't be stingy while you flounder in troubled waters. Ignore the elitist "lawmaker" who offers you entitlements for life, or speaks of "rights to free health care and free housing" and not about your personal growth, who promises you other people's money, rather than the dignity of labor and self-reliance.

Choose to monetize your joy in the marketplace, convert your talents into profit. There are two paths to wealth. One is competence. The other is greed. Competence requires that you develop an inner world of greater capacity, of effort and skills to satisfy the needs of others in the marketplace. The second path is that greedy alternative called socialism, entitlement and your so-called "right" to the fruits of other people's labor. Being competent can turn your joy into wealth. Being a greedy socialist can turn the American experiment into a totalitarian nightmare. The following chart is from my upcoming eBook, "The 9 Gifts of Capitalism – Why Prosperity Requires Freedom."

If you remember one thing, remember this. Entitlement is the sugar coating on the poison pill of dependency. External locus of control wouldn't have it any other way.