Counter Hegemony: Entitlement, Raised Expectations and Social Control
I was recently at a dinner with some friends in New York’s East Village. Two of them, Matt and Madeline, started explaining a concept from social movement theory, namely that before periods of great social upheaval, unrest, or organized social movements, there is often a period directly preceding it where the expectations of the public are raised. In other words, people begin to have a sense of entitlement, which then can’t be met by the system, and they make the connections and rebel against the system which made those false promises (i.e. raised expectations can lead to politicization and radicalization). The example they used was the Civil Rights Movement, and the period directly beforehand when blacks had helped fight fascism in the Second World War for a country that segregated them at home - a country they had to return to after the war. As you would rightly expect, they weren’t too happy. An increased sense of entitlement, and raised expectations for progress, were shattered by the system of racial apartheid at home.
More recently, I was reading Greg Wilpert’s book called “Changing Venezuela By Taking Power“, where he explained some of the factors that lead Venezuela to where it is today on a road to possible genuine liberation. He talked about, in more detail than I will include here (it’s definitely worth the read if you want an honest account of what’s going on with the Bolivarian Revolution; the point of view you won’t get in the corporate media), how the Venezuelans had their expectations raised around the systems of capitalism and representative democracy, both of which failed them miserably - as those systems will consistently do to the people at the bottom of the social ladder. The result? This allowed room for President Hugo Chavez, and members of the Venezuelan Left to organize a movement, and use governmental power to push for new systems: Participatory Democracy and Socialism for the 21st Century.
And then, as a final example, last weekend, when I was returning to Brooklyn with Kate and Pat, the subway train paused longer than usual in the subway at Borough Hall. The station manager came on the loudspeaker and announced that due to a problem with the trains we’d have to take bus. So we existed the station and walked, along with a hundred to two-hundred people, to the nearby bus stop.
When a train stops running in New York City, its customary for passengers to get a free transfer to the bus (a one-ride metrocard/subway ticket costs $2.00 normally - and if you don’t get a transfer, you have to pay another $2.00 for the bus) or another train. When hundreds of people get off a subway train though, they almost never give out physical/paper transfer tickets to those passengers. And since the MTA’s (subway authority) communication isn’t always the best, there is no way the bus driver would know that all of this is going on in the middle of the night.
So when there are 150 or 200 people all lined up to get on a train, in the middle of the night, in a mass of people (not in a line), you can imagine that some people will get upset when the bus driver asks some questions about the train being stopped. In other words, when people feel like they have been wronged and are entitled to compensation or justice, they are very willing to fight for that justice (even when “justice” is just a free transfer ticket).
As I was at the back of the crowd chatting with Pat, Kate, and Daniel (who we’d randomly bumped into at the bus stop), I couldn’t help but be amused by a thought that had entered my mind. Suppose there was a crowd of people, who didn’t get kicked off the train. Instead they were waiting like normal for the bus. Imagine that you then make an announcement, that you can all rip off the MTA by simply saying that the train had stopped, and you all were forced to get off. Well, while I was standing there watching dozens of people forcefully piling into a cramped bus, I couldn’t help but admit to myself that very few people would ever go along with such a plan. I thought immediately back to Matt and Madeline’s comments about social movement theory around people feeling entitlement. If you raise expectations to the point where people feel entitled to some service or social norm, they will fight like hell to make sure they have it - and will be furious if they don’t.
My mind switched to the big picture, in thinking about what that means for social movements. Since I study communications and human thought processes, I couldn’t help but think about what implications the Metrocard Transfer Thought Experiment had for the dominant stories that run through our society. If that phenomenon exists when people feel entitled to something, and often not when they don’t, what does that mean for GOP/Rightwing narratives like “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps”, and “Trickle Down Economics”, and the demonization of programs of social welfare (and the word “welfare” itself - as if human welfare is somehow bad). The implications kinda knocked the wind out of me. They must debilitate chances for social change. In short, those narratives must be destroyed. We need new, progressive narratives about what is right and wrong in society.
But realizing these things also should give us hope - we can change these them. We can build movements which empower people, and give them a sense of entitlement about what rightfully theirs.
With the last remnants of the New Deal on its deathbed and with a looming environmental crisis about to wreak havoc upon our world, our generation - raised in the age of information technology and expecting to have the same basic social safety net that previous generations had - will soon come to the conclusion (if we help them out a bit), that their reasoned disillusionment with change, will be minute compared to the consequences of not fighting back. As a movement we must seize the opportunity presented by our current political moment.
Our demands should be simple: “we want the world!”
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