Editing Openai/6962ca00-cfa0-800a-ac62-bd84f6c201e0 (section)

===== For most of human history, status was: =====
* Locally conferred
* Stable across generations
* Minimally contingent on abstract performance metrics

Being “default” meant:
* You didn’t have to justify your presence
* Your norms were invisible (just “normal”)
* Institutions were implicitly calibrated to you

This is not about entitlement in the conscious sense. It is about expectation inertia. People experience the loss of default status not as “others gaining dignity,” but as the rules changing without consent.

That produces resentment even if no injustice has occurred.

You are applying a liberal, Enlightenment framework (“only dignity is default; everything else is earned”). They are reacting from a pre-liberal framework in which:
* Belonging precedes achievement
* Identity precedes merit
* Social legitimacy is inherited

That framework is obsolete—but obsolescence does not erase its psychological force.