Holding on and letting go: privilege, entitlement and sacrifice

Exploring belonging, significance, responsibility... and accountability

my youngest child choosing adventure; Mt. Shasta beyond

In our first therapy session of the new year — the day before Stacey Abrams led Democrats to victory in two Senate races in Georgia, and 48 hours before an angry white mob stormed the U.S. Capitol — the relationship therapist my wife and I see broke up with us. More to the point: she broke up with me.

The day before, I had sent out the first version of my “new year’s note” — an annual reflection on the year behind, framing intentions for the year ahead. I titled it “holding on and letting go.” The breakup came down to this: my therapist wanted me to practice less holding on, more letting go. She was trying to illuminate what she saw as a blindspot for me, and ending the relationship was her last ditch effort to get me to “see.” Specifically, she invited me to practice not getting my way, to tolerate disappointment, to experience sacrifice.

She’s right, of course. And: it’s complicated. I found myself resisting (in the months leading up to our breakup, and in the weeks since as I’ve been processing it) her suggestions in this vein. Not because they felt wrong, but because they felt incomplete: I wasn’t sure how to act on them in a way that felt in integrity with who I’m trying to be. What kind of sacrifice am I seeking to embody?

So today I want to write about entitlement, sacrifice, significance, and belonging. Usually I use this newsletter to share a perspective I’m coming to: how I’m navigating a particular complexity. This post I think will be more of an inquiry: not a perspective yet, but maybe how I’m trying to come to a perspective. No TL;DR because I’m not yet sure what I’m trying to say… and I want the piece to reflect that without going back to provide structure that doesn’t yet exist. So… please bear with me.

Two forms of privilege

I wish I could find the article where I first encountered this idea, which struck me as revolutionary at the time. Basically, the author argued that there are two types of privilege:

1) Basic human rights (something all of us are entitled to): think things all babies need, and thus what everyone should have (both positive rights like food, shelter, and health care, as well as negative rights like freedom from violence). The ‘white privilege’ of not being beaten by a police officer during a confrontation is recast in this framing as a basic human right that should be extended to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. The ask here is not for people who have this privilege to give it up, but to energetically join in solidarity to ensure everyone can enjoy similar rights. (I’m also drawn to Simone Weil’s work here; she argues that rights is too narrow a frame; rather these are unconditional obligations — we might say responsibilities — owed to everyone by virtue of our humanity).

2) Unearned privilege (something none of us are entitled to): things no one should have (or at least, no one should have any more claim to than anyone else). Here the white privilege of legacy college admissions, e.g., is a privilege that can be recast as an unearned and therefore unfair advantage. The ask here is for people who have this unearned advantage to give it up… and to organize in solidarity to dismantle the system that allows that privilege to persist (ahem, mortgage interest deduction).

Reviewing Peggy McIntosh’s classic Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of white privilege through this lens is an illuminating exercise; in my mind, the vast majority feel to me like things everyone should be ‘entitled’ to (or is that just the part of me talking that is reluctant to sacrifice?)

So part of my discomfort with the question of entitlement and sacrifice comes down to this: what am I being asked to sacrifice (what should I hold on to… what do I let go of?) Basic rights, or unearned privilege? They’re often painted with the same broad brush. As Kate Manne wrote in her book Entitled (on white male privilege), echoing Weil above:

Learning what one is entitled to is—or at least should be—inextricably connected with learning what one owes to others.

“Belonging without significance is entitlement”

I take this line from Jane Nelsen*, founder of the Positive Discipline parenting philosophy (hat tip to Julietta Skoog who introduced me to it). It’s a riff on Alfred Adler’s foundational work, which contends that all babies (and therefore all humans) experience two core needs: belonging, and significance. It immediately resonated when I first heard it, and I found myself returning to it as I watched the spectacle of violent white grievance at the Capitol.

[*A friend asked me to include an important caveat here: I don’t endorse Nelsen’s approach; there are aspects of Positive Discipline that I find really attractive, and aspects that perpetuate patriarchy… for the purposes of this post I’m interested in the insight around significance and belonging without endorsing her broader work.]

One explicit motivation for me in launching Building Belonging was as a response to the rise of far-right nationalism, and specifically recognizing that the primary animating impulse driving violent extremism is a quest for belonging… and significance. I’ve also understood this through a gendered lens; as scholars have long documented, extremist violence is an overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) male phenomenon.

Watching the spectacle at the Capitol, I found myself returning to the term Michael Kimmel coined for the resentment animating male violence: “aggrieved entitlement.” I think it’s worth separating these two terms, in part through the case study of Kimmel himself. He is two things at the same time (and no doubt many other things besides): the godfather of the field of profeminist masculinity studies… and someone who stands accused of sexual harassment in the era of #MeToo. One way I’m thinking about Kimmel: he is entitled, but not aggrieved. He thought he was writing about someone else out there (Trump supporters, white nationalists)… and neglected to recognize in their rage his own unexamined sense of entitlement.

Significance as responsibility… and accountability?

Perhaps that frame can be one way to parse responsibility and accountability in seeking to understand the roles of the leaders and enablers of the Capitol insurrection (people like Trump, Cruz, Hawley, and Boebert) and the followers (hardcore white nationalists and misguided QAnoners alike). Both bristle with entitlement (the random white guy with his shoes up on Speaker Pelosi’s desk; the GOP congressman who refused to go through the metal detector); but only one group is really aggrieved and primed for violence.

The only thing I’ve found in two years of searching where Nelsen elaborates on her provocative line is this podcast, where she equates belonging with love, and significance with responsibility. To extend her thinking: responsibility requires accountability. And for so many white men in America (myself included!)… there is no real accountability. We have belonging… but not significance. Worse: we have significance… without accountability. Significance becomes stripped of its Adlerian intent (providing us with purpose and meaning) and instead becomes a proxy for power and status.

Here’s one way I’m thinking about it: the difference between Hawley (Stanford, Yale) and the guy with his feet on the desk is access to power. They both feel entitled to power; but those who don’t have it feel aggrieved. Aggrievement then is an expression of powerlessness (former white supremacist Christian Picciolini makes this point evocatively in this short video on his work with deradicalization; violence is a claim to power for those who feel powerless). As Rebecca Solnit wrote:

Violence too comes out of a sort of entitlement.

A note to unpack more fully somewhere in a future post: I also think there’s more here about their (our) relationship to belonging. On the one hand, by virtue of being born white men in America, they (we) have an implicit sense of belonging. But that sense of belonging is fragile and false, at some level. Something Chris Corrigan said recently in conversation has stuck with me, which I’m paraphrasing as:

We [white people in North America] have a deep sense of unbelonging, because at some level we fear that we actually don’t belong… we recognize that we stole this land.

Significance, entitlement… and sacrifice

When my therapist suggested that I needed to practice ‘sacrifice,’ I felt a visceral negative reaction in my body. I have a deep aversion to the concept of sacrifice, for reasons I’m still exploring. Here are a few:

1) In its ‘masculine’ expression I associate it with violence: war, suicide bombings, and denying suffering (think “playing through the pain” in sports).

2) In its ‘feminine’ expression, I associate it with martyrdom, with a form of self-sacrifice to the point of self-erasure (this scene from Joy Luck Club breaks my heart: asking women to “eat their own bitterness”).

3) Paradoxically, sacrifice can actually beget entitlement. The person doing the sacrifice feels entitled to what they sacrificed for; otherwise, their sacrifice has no meaning. And: the person receiving the sacrifice (as an act of service) can come to feel entitled to that sacrifice (men’s entitlement to the invisible emotional labor of women, e.g.)

4) Sacrifice emphasizes what we are giving up, not what we are getting. It centers the loss, and de-centers the gain. I worry that it triggers scarcity, and our fear of loss.

5) I fear that sacrifice is rarely a proactive choice; it feels like a product of structural constraints rather than agency (in the context of this pandemic, women are sacrificing their professional lives to stay home with children who can’t go to school… can we meaningfully call that a choice?) Indeed, the original coinage of the “ideology of sacrifice” (which I briefly discussed in a recent post) emerged precisely to justify a situation which in my view should not be justified: it is a form of tolerating injustice rather than working for justice.

6) In its extreme forms (suicide bombing), it feels almost cynical: it’s an abdication of responsibility to co-create a better collective outcome. (Witness the public willingness of some white men to die in the pandemic in order to ‘save’ the economy, rather than doing the hard work and collective contributions required to get through it together). Sacrifice in this sense can actually be a barrier to caring for the whole.

7) Finally, related but different: it’s a shortcut for claiming significance (and therefore identity) that bypasses the more difficult work of building an intrinsic identity, one that is about who we are and not what we do. In this I find myself returning to Eric Hoffer’s classic treatise on totalitarianism and mass movements (which I wrote about on the occasion of Trump’s election in 2016):

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

Collective survival requires… individual sacrifice?

One thread that cuts through the sacrifice/entitlement issue for me is how we respond to the climate crisis. Two things are clear:

1) Any response commensurate to the gravity of the threat requires a radical transformation of the entire global economy and current systems;

2) To be successful, and to come anywhere close to something approximating justice, those who have the most will need to give up the most. As Alexander Zaitchik put it in his review of Jason Hickel’s new book:

For degrowth to be just, global, and effective, the sharpest reduction in consumption will have to come from the north, where the greatest damage to the planet is currently being done... the planet’s richest one percent has a carbon footprint twice the size of the poorest half of the world’s population combined. 

I believe this to be self-evident. And: I don’t believe the language of “sacrifice” advances us toward our goal of transforming the global economic system. I appreciate efforts to work within the “sacrifice” framework by making visible all the things we already sacrifice (as outlined in this thoughtful take by John Meyer). But it still feels to me like working within the wrong paradigm. As Petr Kouba reminds us,

A sacrifice has no inner value in itself.

Its significance depends on its symbolic value, or on something else being attained in exchange. In my view, this is a fatal flaw that limits its scalability as a construct. Core to my work with Building Belonging is the notion that every act we take is moving us closer to the future we desire… and even if it isn’t, the act is still intrinsically valuable and worth doing.

So here’s the paradox I’m sitting with: to meaningfully address the climate crisis, we need to sacrifice. (Applied to my relationship with my wife: to meaningfully address patriarchy requires that men sacrifice). And: framing it as sacrifice makes us less likely to do it.

Entitlement justifies supremacy

As I was researching (read: procrastinating) for this post I read this great essay by Eric Holthaus… which in turn took me unexpectedly to philosopher Sam Earle and her work on the concept of “social imaginaries.” Social imaginaries can be understood as ideologies: core constructs that underpin our actions; they are almost always invisible. She explains:

I refer to the core of the social imaginary as the ‘keystone concept’: it is that which holds the whole system together. 

The whole piece is a provocative and mind-expanding read, but here’s her conclusion:

“Entitlement” is the keystone concept that underpins our current Western imaginary, and that best sums up the particular character of contemporary western societies… If we wish to transform society, we must reject and replace the keystone concept of entitlement. 

And somehow from starting this piece reflecting on my therapist’s recommendation for my marriage… we’ve ended up here.

I think Earle’s right (and my therapist too, though I’m not sure this was exactly what she had in mind). Here’s how I put the pieces together: the ideology of entitlement is what justifies systems of supremacy. In a piece exploring the phenomena of rich white men like Trump, Naomi Klein explains the twisted logic of entitlement:

Success does not come because you were showered with privileges. You were showered with privileges because you are better.

Miki Kashtan, among my favorite practitioners in post-supremacist world-building, agrees with Earle; a world of liberation and equity cannot coexist with the framework of entitlement. She observes:

Such a world cannot come into existence as long as the notion of deserving is deeply rooted in our consciousness.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice”

Thus far I haven’t been very charitable in my discussion of sacrifice. There are positives, and maybe my objections are ultimately semantic. Sacrifice derives etymologically from the French for “sacred;” surely I don’t intend to profane the sacred. For a more generous interpretation, here’s Gandhi:

While acting, remember that action leads to bondage unless it is performed in a spirit of sacrifice. Sacrifice means exerting oneself for the benefit of others, in a word, it means service.

It’s not often I quote scripture (I’m a recovering Catholic), but if I’m going to offer a rebuttal to Gandhi I need to dig deep. When Jesus said “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” I hear him explicitly rejecting the dominant lens through which we understand his death on the cross. It seems to me he’s saying: it didn’t have to be this way. I actually don’t think he’s disagreeing with Gandhi: I think they’re both asking for a spirit of broader care, to “exert oneself for the benefit of others;” a willingness to take what Vaclav Havel calls “responsibility for the whole.” The question is what happens to the ‘self’ as we exercise that broader care? Mercy puts the focus in my view where it belongs: on the ‘other,’ it’s an expression of compassion. Sacrifice centers the person doing the sacrifice; paradoxically, it reifies the ‘I’ in its focus on the ‘We.’

I think this gets to the core of my struggle with sacrifice. The framework we use in Building Belonging is “I, We, World,” meaning that we invite everyone to take responsibility for all levels… all the time. The concept of sacrifice lands for me as a subjugation of the “‘I.’ In our individualistic ego-centric culture, there’s no doubt we need more of that.

And: I don’t want to sacrifice the I, but rather I want to bring it into right relationship with the We and the World. It’s not caring less about the I… (though perhaps it is?) it’s caring more about other elements. Our capacity for care and for love is not zero sum; it is abundant. This is why I’m drawn to john powell’s concept of “expanding our circle of concern”: from the I to the We to the World. It’s asking us to care as much about others as we do about ourselves and those we love… not to care about ourselves less (though maybe we should?)

I’m not interested in transcending the ego; I’m interested in integrating it. I think this has huge implications for agency, for how we show up and act in the world. I love the Buddhist concept of interbeing, popularized by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Interbeing says we exist… in relationship. That is, we are inextricably interdependent. But I understand the concept of “inter” to imply a relationship between things… which necessarily implies a definable self… a self with agency.

In this maybe I diverge from other interpretations of Buddhism, and perhaps religion in general (thinking here of Ken Wilber’s observation that religion functions both to “create meaning for the separate self” and then “utterly shatters it”). I’m not interested in shattering our selves… I want to integrate them as an essential part of a broader whole.

From supremacy to liberation: from sacrifice to gift?

I’m thinking now of Cyndi Suarez’ distinction between supremacist forms of power (an unhealthy form of entitlement, or privilege) and liberatory forms of power. Perhaps what’s needed is to let go of the ideology of sacrifice and entitlement that supports supremacy… and hold on to a notion of sacrifice (new word, please!) that supports belonging.

One way to understand my resistance is because I’m seeing the shadow aspects of sacrifice without appreciating the positive. I see the “giving up” rather than the “giving.” As I was thinking about the opposite of sacrifice… maybe it’s just a gift? Or maybe it’s joy? Perhaps it’s as simple as reconceiving sacrifice as a “contribution to the common good,” as Michael Sandel would have it. A gift is about the intention of the giver, done out of care for the recipient. But unlike a sacrifice, the value of the act does not depend on its receipt. It is something we can practice every day, in our micro-interactions. Cyndi explains:

It is in everyday interactions that one either contributes to unequal power dynamics or interrupts them.

This, I suspect, is what my therapist was trying to tell me. Where my tendency (both as I was socialized, and as I reacted in opposition to that socialization) is to over-anchor on the World, or to defend my I, she’s reminding me to pay attention to the We (in this case, the microcosm We of our marriage). And to my wife, my primary practice partner for this liberatory world I so desperately long for. So maybe I can hold onto my World, focus more on my We (my wife!) and let go (a bit!) of my I… trusting that she’ll be there to care for it too.

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That ended up being longer than I expected… yet obviously there’s a lot I didn’t develop here. I find myself thinking in particular about Esther Perel’s “7 verbs” for a healthy loving/sexual relationship, and noting how woefully underdeveloped my skills are… with almost all of them. There’s something I want to unpack more fully, especially when it comes to the verbs ‘to receive’ and ‘to take,’ there’s something about ‘worth’ or ‘value’ that feels important here… not entitlement or ‘deserve,’ which, following Kashtan and Earle I agree we need to let go of.

Something about building up our sense of a ‘right’ to receive and to take (take a breath, take a nap… things we need rather than taking ‘from’ someone else)…. but letting go of our sense of debt, of owing, of obligation, of that insidious word ‘should.’ Can we learn to see responsibility as a positive intrinsic ethic of care, rather than an externally imposed debt? Something we each are worthy of by virtue of our humanity… but owed by no one? Maybe it’s simply this: we matter. Because we are.

I’ll close with an inquiry from Amia Srinivasan in her provocative, nuanced, and exquisitely-written “Does anyone have the right to sex?”

The question​, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion. 

If you made it this far, thanks for allowing me to think out loud. I welcome — and appreciate! — reactions. What resonates, what doesn’t, how do you understand sacrifice and entitlement… this stuff feels deep, and I feel like I only have a snorkel. If anyone’s got scuba gear… let me know what you find down there!