Rather than my longer, drawn own forays and pondering on a topic, I am going to experiment with a briefer, most concise discussion on a topic, without justifying or explaining all the reasons for what I present.
What follows is a social hypothesis about the degrees of complexity that conflicts can take and how they correspond to entitlement.
1) Humans are complex creatures, whose desires, wants, dreams, goals, hopes along with their joys, fears, frustrations do not follow a simple, law-like progression and consistency from one moment to the next. We like what we like for various sorts of, we don’t like what we don’t like for various sorts of reasons, but these can change without our knowledge based upon changes in situation, changes in life experience, etc.
2) Furthermore, humans have a wide range of goals and expectations that we learn to negotiate between, both within ourselves and with other people.
3) The more things people feel entitled to, the more of their goals and expectations they feel others have a moral obligation to give to them.
4) At the root of social conflicts are feelings of violation of these basic sense of moral obligations.
5) The more people feel entitled to, the more likely they are to perceive multiple violations.
6) When moral violations are perceived, we tend to impute many of our negative feelings towards the perceived violator. The graver the perception of the violation, the more of the negative feelings we impute to them.
7) Ergo, the more entitled people feel, the more complex and complicated their involvements in conflicts makes the conflict.
8) Since the proverb “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” plays out to be true often times, the type of complexity we perceive in conflicts are often times determined by those who have a greater degree of entitlement, as they are more willing to demand.
9) However, not all feelings of entitlement are equivalent, nor are the perception of their violations. For instance, abuse is often times the expression of a very simple form of entitlement: to not wrongfully threaten, control, or inflict blatant harm onto someone. These type of entitlements are different to other forms of entitlements. So, entitlements are not necessarily wrong nor complex in terms of what is expected, even if they can be complicated in trying to make ones case in a conflict.
10) In managing and resolving complex conflicts, the first imperative question comes down to investigating and boiling down to what are the basic sense of entitlements of the people involved and whether these entitlements are recognized as protected or not and recognized as violated or not.
11) When this basic imperative is not taken seriously, the squeaky wheel of highly entitled people get the upper hand.
12) When this basic imperative is taken seriously, one may more accurately distinguish between the different entitlements.
13) In conflicts, perceptions of violations of entitlements makes socially aggressive people (who tend to feel highly entitled in the first place) resort attempts to (mis)represent what the other party feels entitled to, thereby increasing the perceived complexity of the conflict and lessening the likelihood that the other party’s side will be heard and listened to. People who are socially protective, by contrast, tend to focus more on representing their side and insofar as they represent the other party, it will be framed in terms of specific violations, fear, and ambiguity.
14) When people’s sense of entitlements have been violated, their engagement with the conflict will change based upon the perception that others recognize the violation of entitlement. In other words, trust that is lost in conflicts is restored the more the reasons for those violations are recognized. As trust is reestablished, their contribution to the complexity of the conflict will decrease.
15) Furthermore, sometimes, people can relent on their sense of entitlement for various reasons. Usually, this is because a person has an internal sense of moral convictions that lead them to say “I am not entitled to that.”
16) However, people who have a persistent feeling of entitlement, whether due to an egregious violation or due to their personality feeling entitled to much, that are not acknowledged by others will either increase their involvement in the conflict or disengage, depending on the situation and their own internal sense of morality and ethics.