The Entitlement Trap
This is a four-part series about narcissism in a variety of its permutations. It describes a problem, almost as ancient as Judaism, and still important today. Part Two investigates how rationalized comforts can quickly transform into a sense of entitlement.
Early in my career, I worked at a psychiatric hospital. At some point, an opportunity came along to lighten my load: fewer direct patients, more supervision. I took it. It was offered. It was easier. And I found perfectly good reasons why it made sense. I was, after all, a good supervisor.
The head of the hospital noticed, eventually, and told me no. Not because I was supervising badly. He said no because I’d quietly expanded my own comfort at the institution’s expense, and had convinced myself it was sensible.
He was right about that. And the correction stuck with me, not because of what it taught me about hospital staffing, but because of what it taught me about myself.
Here’s the lesson. Offer an entitlement, and the psyche will usually take it. We have a remarkable talent for rationalizing our self-centeredness, and dressing it up as something good. It’s not a character flaw reserved only for bad people; it’s a feature of being human.
I wasn’t a bad psychiatrist. I was someone who’d been handed something easier and found, without much effort, a way to justify why it made sense to seize this opportunity.
I start with myself because this whole series is about narcissism, the charismatic kind, the group kind, the kind hiding inside our injuries, and I’ve come to believe entitlement sits at its center.
Nobody wakes up one morning and decides: “Today I’ll become a narcissist!”
Instead, they take what’s offered, rationalize it, and keep doing both until the rationalization hardens into an entitled identity.
This is true for individuals, and just as true for leaders.
For example, a leader is given the chance to bend a rule for himself, just once, for a good enough reason. He takes it, justifies it, and people believe him. Yet in that moment a lesson is being taught, that we aren’t always obliged to act with absolute integrity.
History has endless examples of these phenomena. Religious. Non-religious. Monarchies. Industrial barons. Over generations, entitlement starts to look like a birthright.
None of this requires villainy. It only requires what I had while working in that hospital: an offer, a plausible reason, and nobody strong enough to hold up a mirror before it’s too late.
The problem is that left unattended, entitlement doesn’t sit still. Instead, it grows. Somebody who’s rationalized one comfort soon finds the next one that much easier to rationalize. Eventually the story stops being “I deserve this particular thing” and becomes the non-empathic, “I deserve more than you, because of who I am or what I’ve suffered.” That is where entitlement finishes its metamorphosis into grandiosity and endless specialness; or into the victim’s version with its own version of entitlement.
Either way, an asymmetry with others opens. In my experience, that asymmetry nicely reflects how far the problem has traveled. The self quietly reorganizes the world into two tiers: me on top, real and owed; you below, an obstacle. Binary and asymmetric, the same relational format every time, whether it arrives wearing the crown of the grandiose, or the wound of the victim.
The key point here is that it almost never begins in malice; it begins in hurt — in someone frustrated, or deprived, or frightened, reaching for a story that makes the pain make sense. Or, it begins with a talent or wonderful quality, that brings the kind of status that allows you to take without realizing you’re taking.
As a Jew, what strikes me is how our own tradition warned us about precisely this.
Halacha takes entitlement seriously. It’s full of protections for what a person is rightfully owed. Kings themselves are limited. But the tradition doesn’t stop at the letter of the law. It asks more, and it has a name for that something: lifnim meshurat hadin, going beyond the letter of the law.
There are moments when you’re entitled, by strict law, to insist on the full measure of what’s owed you. Nevertheless, the higher path is not to insist, but rather, to yield something you’re technically entitled to for the sake of a relationship, or a community.
The law tells you what you’re allowed to take, while the concept of lifnim meshurat hadin asks you to notice the moment when taking it, even rightfully, starts to cost more than what you actually gain.
This form of restraint takes inner work. And is incredibly impressive as a demand for our souls.
I think that’s why sinat chinam, the baseless hatred the rabbis blamed for the destruction of the Second Temple, was never really baseless. It grew out of people who wouldn’t practice lifnim meshurat hadin, who held their ground on what they were technically owed, and slowly came to hate whoever stood in the way.
The hatred was the residue, not the cause. A community certain of its own entitlement, unwilling to give up anything for the sake of the whole, eventually stops seeing outsiders as family — or worse, as equally human and deserving.
It starts seeing them as obstacles, sometimes contemptuously so. That is how a people fractures from the inside, not through one catastrophic sin, but through an accumulation of small, well-justified refusals to bend.
I think about this when I consider the role of religion in Israeli society today. I have no right to judge anyone’s commitments, nor to dictate what any group owes to the broader society. I have no right to tell anyone how much Torah study is enough, or what a person owes the State of Israel in exchange for being permitted to learn. Those are not my questions to settle.
What I can offer, as a psychiatrist rather than a rabbi, is the question I had to ask myself in that hospital: Has something I received as a gift turned into something I now defend as a right?
Did the conversation shift from gratitude to entitlement without even noticing it? Nobody else can answer that question. It can only be asked from the inside, by people who are courageous enough to undertake a true cheshbon hanefesh, meaning, a genuine self-evaluation.
It’s okay to feel special and to hold pride in what your community carries. But the moment that specialness develops into a sense of entitlement, it starts to distort one’s vision. Once entitlement sets, leaders protect what they have — and we must do better than that.
This is not a religious question; it’s a human one.
Entitlement is found in the mafia. And it’s found in good families.
It’s found in people with pedigrees, and amongst people who are wounded who feel that they need to turn the tables.
We talked about Narcissus and Echo in the last essay, and it’s important that we don’t just continue to look at ourselves in a pond while ignoring others who count just as much.
I’m not equipped to answer it for anyone, but I do know that asking it honestly is lifnim meshurat hadin in practice, and a community secure enough to ask it of itself isn’t weakened by the asking. It’s strengthened by it.
So let me be precise because I don’t want to be misread as saying entitlement itself is the problem. It isn’t. Everyone is entitled to something, and every community carries something that deserves to feel precious.
Feeling special, feeling that what you carry matters, isn’t narcissism. It’s a healthy, necessary part of being a person, or a people, with an identity worth keeping.
Narcissistic thinking starts one step past that. The moment “I am entitled to this” becomes “I am more entitled than you.” The moment a legitimate claim slides into an asymmetry, where my needs are real and yours are in the way.
And when it slides to, I am superior to you, or have contempt for you, watch out.
I think about that hospital often. I wasn’t a villain for taking what was given. I was a person doing what many do when something is handed to them. What saved me from becoming something worse was a fair-minded man forcing a self-confrontation, before entitlement had time to set. I don’t know if I would have asked it of myself.
But somebody has to start. It’s hard to impose lifnim meshurat hadin from outside. Rather, it’s best to be chosen, by a person or a community secure enough to yield something it’s technically owed, for the sake of a peace worth more than the claim.
Giving up something you rightfully own isn’t weakness. I’d argue it’s the most mature use of power there is. Because the moment a people decides it’s so special, or so injured, that it can’t afford to yield anything at all, it hasn’t just lost its neighbor. It’s lost its way.
How that plays out with our enemies, and with ourselves, is the subject of the next part of this series.
