“I have no right to anything, but I deserve everything” is the refrain, the constant prayer of victims, of those who always feel disadvantaged in accounting for unfulfilled efforts, promises, and desires. Having sacrificed oneself, having done everything for the benefit of others or a situation, is thought of as an asset, as a guarantee of deserving everything.
Nothing is more alienating, nothing more objectifying for the individual, for the human being, as well as for its social and family relationships, than the certainty of deserving but not having rights. And when this division between the individual and the other, when these existential fragmentations are experienced as “I have no right to anything but I deserve everything,” this postulate starts a process of revolt, exacerbating fears and frustrations created by being subjected to the other, to its desires and wishes, sometimes inhuman ones.
Sacrifices, renunciation and forgiveness are the mainstays of objectifying and alienating relationships, especially within the family. Perceiving what is around you by reducing it to convenient or undesirable situations structures a strong sense of opportunity. Insisting on taking advantage of gaps that arise creates an opportunistic attitude which is characterized by hiding incapacities through aids or artifices, transforming them into the ability to achieve through the other, or rather using the other.
This right to use the other is claimed and neutralized by the idea of deserving everything. Full of plans, goals and desires responsible for frustrations, fears and anxieties, the individual suffers and thus feels victimized by the system and people. Dealing with this distortion of feeling at the center of the world - distortion created by self-referencing - the idea of unrecognized merit then grows the impression of not having the necessary means for life, of not having the slightest retribution for the sacrifices and actions performed. This evaluation, which generates frustration, is responsible for the requirement to receive and to have rights assisted and maintained.
Not having rights, not receiving anything they think they deserve, create losers, complainers, and insurgents who receive or ask for everything, who negotiate everything to meet their needs and desires, now cataloged under the label of deserving.
Even when one rebels and feels exploited in labor relations or when socially discriminated against, the refrain “I have no right to anything but I deserve everything” is maintained, although it is supported by the verification of the processes of spoliation and use by those endowed with power and capital, because in the authoritarian and meritocratic context contradictions are not perceived; only the great voids and the feeling of lack are perceived: hunger and lack that urgently need to be filled.
The seriousness of stances between rights and deserving result from the division and opposition between them. To evaluate is to reduce values, generally incompatible with the relational process of being with the other. To break this relational unity is to establish a position of victim, of master; deserving, punishing, rewarding. By breaking the dialectical relationship, positions are established: the superior-inferior appears, the master-slave, the donor-dependent, and thus depersonalization and division come out, also creating demands, resignations, and complaints.
When parents relate to their children through rewards and punishments, they build scales of values and merits referenced in the processes of submission and frustration, which later on will clash with others in different situations where compromise, bargaining, and blackmail may dominate or not. Until they realize that it is not necessary to “give to receive,” to “lie to disguise,” people feel strange, not belonging, without knowing how to act.
Breaking the unity always pulverizes the personality and creates giver and/or dependent automata. Prodigals and petty people begin to populate the world creating utilitarian orders and squandering purposes of human possibilities.