20 CHAPTER TWENTY: Paying the Piper

There is an interesting book on child rearing, entitled “Raising Self Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World” (by Glenn and Nelson.) The basic idea is that children in an agrarian society have real and meaningful responsibilities from early ages, empowering them with work ethic, earned self-esteem, and a sense of their role in society. But our current culture does not support the development of those qualities. In their words,

Without a meaningful role is it difficult to develop a sense of meaning, purpose, and significance through being needed, listened to, and taken seriously.

Compared to “just doing it ourselves,” it takes more time to teach kids household responsibilities and more patience to wait for them to fulfill those responsibilities. That time and patience are critical components of helping our kids grow into responsible adults but it is not clear we are providing them.

At the same time, we have more resources than ever before. At virtually every level of our society, we purchase more things with less “saving up” than we did a generation ago. Instead of waiting until a birthday or Christmas for that big purchase, we tend to run out and get it now—and then look for something more to give on the special occasion. Our children, growing up in this culture of immediate gratification, know of no other way. And all of us can easily feel entitled—feel we have the “right” to—all of these new resources. As discussed in another chapter, riffing off of the old saying, “If you give a man a fish for a day he can eat for a day”… if you give a man a fish each day for three days, on the fourth day he’ll be waiting for a fish, and if you give a man a fish each day for six days, on the seventh he’ll be complaining that you never have anything but fish. That’s just human nature—we set our expectations based on our experience and quickly begin to feel like we have rights based on those expectations.

And so it can be very easy for us to feel we have rights without feeling any sense of responsibility related to those rights—we are just entitled to them. But the relationship between the two has been understood throughout history: the old saying, “He who calls the tune must pay the piper” focuses on responsibilities coming out of rights, while the American revolutionary cry, “No taxation without representation” focuses on rights coming out of responsibilities. The two are interdependent, and forgetting that doesn’t make it no longer so. Many political and economic crises (e.g. the French Revolution and the global economic crisis of 2008) are considered to be, at least in part, the result of some group or society forgetting the relationship between rights and responsibilities. We forget or ignore that relationship at our peril.

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