While I’m not usually a big fan of George Will’s op-eds, in this case he hits the nail squarely on the head, with his take on the childish entitlement obsession that leftists always seem to have,
You also see the problem with founding a nation, as America is founded, on the principle that human beings are rights-bearing creatures. That they are. But if that is all they are, batten down the hatches.
If our vocabulary is composed exclusively of references to rights, a.k.a. entitlements, we are condemned to endless jostling among elbow-throwing individuals irritably determined to protect, or enlarge, the boundaries of their rights. Among such people, all political discourse tends to be distilled to what Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School calls “rights talk.”
Witness the inability of people nowadays to recommend this or that health-care policy as merely wise or just. Each proposal must be invested with the dignity of a right. And since not all proposals are compatible, you have not merely differences of opinion but apocalyptic clashes of rights.
Rights talk is inherently aggressive, even imperial; it tends toward moral inflation and militates against accommodation. Rights talkers, with their inner monologues of preemptive resentments, work themselves into a simmering state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfulness. To rights talkers, life — always and everywhere — is unbearably congested with insufferable people impertinently rights talking, and behaving, the way you and I, of course, have a real right to.
Exactly. You can see exactly this sort of thing with the lefties who demand a “right” to abort little babies who happen to be inconvenient to the selfish lifestyles of their parents, and who do so by driving a Mack truck over the very real, actual, true-as-day right to life that is affirmed by no less than our nation’s own Declaration of Independence.
Will’s example of the selfish lefties inhabiting Blue enclaves like Chevy Chase is spot on. I live in a similar sort of far-left enclave, and I can testify that most of the people on the Left are some of the most unhappy, arrogant, bigoted, selfish, self-important, entitlement mentalitied nimrods in the country. They truly are the kind of people who would give an angry one-fingered salute to people trying to protect their kids from being run over by low-flying left-wing speed demons who think that their “right” to get to the arugula booth at the Farmer’s Market trumps other peoples’ concerns for the safety of their children.
Unsurprisingly, recent research actually seems to prove that living the upscale progressive lifestyle can make you act like a jerk (hat tip to Yid with Lid),
Just being around green products can make us behave more altruistically, a new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science has found.
But buying those same products can have the opposite effect. Researchers found that buying green can lead people into less altruistic behaviour, and even make them more likely to steal and lie than after buying conventional products. Buying products that claim to be made with low environmental impact can set up “moral credentials” in people’s minds that give license to selfish or questionable behavior.
“This was not done to point the finger at consumers who buy green products. The message is bigger,” says Nina Mazar, a marketing professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and a self-admitted green consumer. “At the end of the day, if we do one moral thing, IT doesn’t necessarily mean we will be morally better in other things as well.”
Mazar, along with her co-author Chen-Bo Zhong, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Rotman School, conducted three experiments. The first found that people perceived green consumers to be more cooperative, altruistic and ethical than those who purchased conventional products. The second experiment showed that participants merely exposed to products from a green store shared more money in a subsequent experimental game, but those who actually made purchases in that store shared less. The final experiment revealed that participants who bought items in the green store showed evidence of lying and stealing money in a subsequent lab game.
So the next time you get stuck behind some erratically-driving dimwit with an Obama sticker on the bumper of their Volvo who is weaving between lanes and flipping people off while thumbing on their Blackberry, you’ll know what’s going on.
Tags: george will, Leftists
