Entitlement and Apologies - Part 1
Easing into the topic of Power and Belonging
I hope you all are making time to read Substacks and romance novels or listen to music or get out in Nature - instead of just obsessing over the state of your 401(k) and the price of eggs. Welcome to the latest essay in They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir - I will try my best to be entertaining as well as thoughtful as I continue to explore the topic of Belonging.
I promised to talk more about the Power of Love. But first letʻs step back to look at Power itself.
The book On Belonging1 came in my swag bag from the 2024 Common Ground Summit2 It sat unopened on my nightstand for months before it literally fell off demanding to be read. The timing was perfect, as my writing about the Mass for the 21st Century took me to the topic of “us” - community - belonging - caring.
Belonging The Book includes wisdom and examples from around the world. Its framework is that there are four dimensions to Belonging: people, place, power, and purpose. Three of those made sense to me immediately. “Power” took me a minute.
I have written so much here already about the intersections between people and place, between people and purpose, between place and purpose - those made sense. I have also written separately about power…but power as a component of belonging was not a distinction I had made.
Insert head-slap emoji. I just had not been thinking the word power - but I had spent a lot of time ranting about programs or actions that nominally give folks a seat at the table, with no actual agency. Thatʻs at least one example of how Power - power to choose, power of voice, power to influence - is needed for Belonging.
Power dynamics show up all the time in relationships. Letʻs take it out of the human realm, recalling what I wrote about my experience training my great equine teacher Zara to be ridden. At the time I thought we were compassionately helping her find the right answer. In hindsight I see we kept taking away her power of choice until she surrendered to the fate she was sure would kill her. We have mechanical power over our companion animals, the power to give or withhold sustenance, the power to euthanize them at a moment of our choosing. Maybe we were gentle in our approach with Zara, but we never questioned that we had the power and right to achieve our goal. As her owner, I believed I was entitled to train her. The answer that was right for me was therefore the answer that was right for her. I refused to listen to her.
Back to people. Most power dynamics in our relationships are structural and subtle - so unless you think hard about them, until you really pay attention, they donʻt show up as “power”. They purr along in the background like a harmless pussy cat. By structural I mean that power differentials get built into organizations as org charts and rules of behavior. I mean they are inherent in the conventions and laws governing interpersonal arrangements like families. By subtle I mean they persist because we incorporate them into our individual identities and without effort to recognize them, we act unconsciously in ways associated with having or not having power.
Unrecognized internalized structures of power show up as entitlement on the part of those with the power. They are the tiger with claws into each of us.
“Entitlement” sometimes has a straightforward meaning - for instance, when ByLaws state that members of a non-profit organization are entitled to vote for directors. It can also mean, and this is the sense in which I am using it in this essay, a belief that one is entitled to privileges, especially when that belief is tied up in oneʻs identity so it operates below the level of conscious evaluation. It is completely taken for granted, so it seems just plain wrong when others make an assessment of entitlement and point out its negative consequences.
Entitlement and its consequences show up in my day to day work as a real estate broker. For example, I wrote a blog post asking new property owners from elsewhere to be respectful and open to learning about Hawaiʻi as people and place3. A reader commented angrily that they have privileges that stem from their right to move anyplace in the U.S. While basically correct that they can buy property anywhere, the assertion that their way of being a good neighbor in Wisconsin should be equally good in Hawaiʻi is an entitled view, one that privileges their background and values over those of the people who have called Hawaiʻi home for generations.
In the commenterʻs world view, the power to declare oneself as “belonging” lay with the newcomer, inherent in property rights. In the Hawaiian world view, the power to declare someone as belonging lay with those already there. 4 In my most recent post I described how even Pele and her sister had to approach places to which they were newcomers with humility. They had to earn the right to claim relationship to place by learning and understanding proper behavior for that place. They did not and could not simply declare themselves kamaʻāina to a place - only the place and the people with prior relationship to that place could say a newcomer now belonged.
The right to include and exclude from Belonging is indeed a matter of Power.
Power, for me, also means the differential ability to get things done. That can be a healthy thing. A community whose members have a strong sense of Belonging, a shared sense of responsibility of care for all, can be a vibrant place to live. That is the Power of Love.
Isnʻt it worth a bit of effort to let go of our assumptions and identity and being smart and being right, for the sake of genuine connection and belonging?
Why that is more than a little bit of effort is up next week.
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel.
Would you like an invitation to attend the 2025 Common Ground Summit? Let me know if you would like to hear more and discuss whether this extraordinary gathering would be a good Place for you.
You can read that post here: Is the Welcome Mat Out for Newcomers to Hawaiʻi?
Once again, which is real, property versus ʻāina.