This is the second and last part of a short series on deserving, what it means, where the idea emerges from, and whether or not it serves us. Part 1 can be read here.
As far as I can tell, "deserve" is very prominent in civilization, which is to say anything past the agricultural revolution, but not so much in "primitive" tribes. Darren Allen points to an example here, in his essay on the primal way:
A famous example [of selflessness] is the Ju/'hoansi practice of mixing up personalised arrows, giving the prestige of a successful hunt to the owner of the arrow, rather than the man who shot it.
My explanation for this is that "deserve" is contingent on two aspects: 1) the sense that the reality of your mind is more important than the reality in front of you, that your beliefs "should" reign over what is, and 2) the perception of isolated individuals, which we can further judge on their own merits, as if they were parts in a machine which we can improve or swap out.
We could say that 1) is idealism, the dominance of ideas over Reality, and 2) is individualized shame, how we can focus our attention on one person at a time and pick out their fault, and force them to align to the group.
If you don't have idealism, then Reality simply is what is the case, and your ideas merely become ways to describe it. There is an astounding carefree attitude that anthropologists notice again and again in "primitive" cultures, with regards to their inevitable death, or where their next meal is going to come from. This suggests to me that the word "should" isn't very present in their vocabulary or way of looking at the world. They don't have a sense that death "should not exist", or that they "need" to control their food supply so that they can have abundance, they simply live in the world, gather the food and hunt the animals around them, and find contentment in this life of subsistence, surrounded by their tribe, and gracefully accept their own death.
We like to think that our ability to dissect reality with our mind is our greatest strength, but is it? What type of world has it led to? Mainly one of atomization from what I can tell, the atomization of Reality into "dead" matter, which we keep sub-dividing into more and more complicated sub-elements, until it becomes utterly unrecognizable from our intuitive sense of what matter even is, or the atomization of social reality into individuals alienated from one another, forced to operate within institutions which have their own requirements, and ways of interacting with one another.
When it comes to all of the important things in life, our ability to love, our sense of freedom, our compassion for others, our ability to be courageous and face our own death for something that matters, we seem more and more atrophied, more and more childish and impotent. Our technical and narrow knowledge is only useful if we fit into alienating institutions which, by virtue of their scale, must rearrange reality to fit their agenda. The way in which a tractor can only drive on farming land which has been reshaped to accomodate it, or how a computer can only interact with data, representations of Reality, and not Reality itself, forcing us to reduce the latter into the former, or how a school can only deal with atomized children which must then take tests measuring their ability to obey to the teacher, on and on.
Idealism is the way in which the representations of Reality become more important than Reality itself, which is a complete and utter inversion. Experience is supposed to come first, because it is what matters to us, and then ideas, tools, methods and frameworks come second. It's like saying that the territory needs to be reshaped until it can be made into a map. It's utter insanity, yet this is the world we live in, where human beings are deemed "irrational" and our models of their psychology considered correct.
Shame then is the mechanism by which a society can force individuals to comply to the agenda, rather than the fluid process of co-creation which is possible at smaller scales, where the individual needs to adapt in some situations, and the collective needs to be changed in others. In large-scale civilization however, the system is always right, and the individuals always to be blamed, which is why the field dealing with "mental health" systematically treats people as "mentally ill", rather than seeing the way in which our world might be insane, and coercing the wildness from which we all emerge from out of them.
Shame shows up again and again in civilization probably because it is the easiest way to build coordination at a large scale. This doesn't make it the best, but it's amongst the fastest and easiest, and because selfish power overrides everything in its path, the memes that achieve a certain amount of power the quickest end up dominating the other ones, and spreading themselves to the point of being essentially the only thing remaining. In other words, the history of civilization can be seen as a race to the bottom of power, and everything else which is not useful to this has fallen on the side, such as love, freedom, curiosity, femininity, child-like innocence, and so on. Hence, Moloch 1.
One of the simplest ways to increase the power of a collective is to increase its size. Not only is an army of a thousand men stronger than any tribe of a hundred and fifty people, but the larger collective has a higher capacity for technological innovation, which means it might not just be bigger, but each individual soldier might be more powerful thanks to the technology wielded by the civilization.
This is where shame links up with the notion of "deserve". If you can get people to work hard for a collective, and even think of it as inherently virtuous to do so, then you get people who are better at building the kind of civilization which can out-compete the others, and keep growing.
Of course "primitive" societies also work hard and face hardship, but their relationship to work is different. Perhaps calling it "play" diminishes the difficulty of their day to day life, but the important thing is that they do not take the pain of life personally, and have a cheerful attitude to life. There is a sense of community in which all of their activities are embedded in, they don't work for a boss who doesn't give a fuss about them and would fire them the moment something goes wrong, they work for themselves and the others in the community whom they love. Thus there is no quest for expansion at all costs, it is work done to fulfill the basic functions of the tribe, at a pace which is comfortable to them, surrounded by other people they share tight bonds with.
More "advanced" civilizations in comparison are rather backwards when it comes to their relationship to work. We are made to feel bad if we do not force ourselves to do things we do not want to, because the collective is rigid and the individual is forced to comply to it. Thus people are made to feel good about their ability to "work hard", which is where we get things like the Protestant work ethic, or its secular derivative, the religion of productivity and self-help.
There is of course value in facing hardship, as running away from difficulties at all costs is a sign of immaturity, but hardship in and of itself is not virtuous. What matters at the end of the day is love, and the self-mastery that can express and defend such love, and this duality expresses itself as the dance of gender, of the feminine in touch with love, and the masculine finding its way through a hero's journey back itself to the 'place' of love. 2
Hard work without the broader context in which we feel love for others, and a sense of belonging to, becomes atomized and meaningless toil. This implicit nihilism and disconnect in our environment is very likely why people are so obsessed with the notion of "deserve" in the modern world. If you felt at home in a collective and were surrounded by people you loved, would you really care all that much about getting other people to recognize the value of the work you put in? Not really right? First of all, because if the others loved you, they would probably see the value in what you did, but more importantly, they would see you as a person, and not as a discrete productive entity in a social machine.
It's only when the individual feels estranged from the collective that they feel the need to fight for their own individual recognition, and for others to reward them more than what they are currently doing. When people are no longer in contact with a greater whole, such as the sense of unity with a community, or even the sense of belonging to the Universe, then they reach for individualism, then they want compensation, then they start fighting for their recognition, because they feel betrayed by the collective at large.
This is ultimately the energy that people express when they feel that they deserve something: a betrayal by society, one that treats people as replaceable parts in the overarching quest of technological progress at all costs. The radical solution doesn't lie in reorganizing our reward system, even if in the short term it can be vital to do so, but it lies in living in collectives that do not engage in the process of atomization and shame to begin with, ones which are within the reach for individuals to change, and which are tight-knit so as to make people feel at home. The Kingdom of God is not built from coercion, shame and reward systems, it is built from compassion and love, and at a scale that allows those values to remain the center of our life, something which the technological system could never do.
1 See Meditations on Moloch for instance.
2 See Man and woman by Darren Allen
Go back to the list of blog posts
Deserve Meritocracy Myths Memetics Civilization Primalism Shame
2026-02-27