I'm one of the undeserving poor, that's what I am. Now, think what that means to a man. It means he's up against middle-class morality for all the time. If there's anything going, and I puts in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: you're undeserving, so you can't have it. But, my needs is as great as the most deserving widows that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. Heh, I don't need LESS than a deserving man, I need MORE. I don't eat less hearty than he does, and I drink... oh, a lot more. I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving... no... I'm undeserving, and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it, and that's the truth.
Alfred P. Doolittle
It’s funny, this never used to happen when I was young and my heart was an open book, but here in my autumn years I find I get distinctly queasy every time I hear someone use the word “deserve”.
Not that I don’t use it myself. Of course I do. And I’m not saying it’s a word that should never be used. It’s just that I find that more and more, and particularly in public discourse, “deserve” is used in a way that I reckon is just…off.
If you won a race, and people told you, “You deserved that win”, what are they saying to you?
Maybe they are saying, “You deserved that because you ran faster than any of the other runners”. In which case, “You deserved that win” is just synonymous with “You won”. So it’s meaningless.
Maybe they are saying, “You deserved that because you worked really hard to become a fast runner”. Which might very well be true, but also suggests that none of the other runners worked as hard as you did, and that hard work is the sole determinant of success. The latter of which is obviously untrue, and the former of which is pretty insulting.
Or maybe they are saying, “You are a good person, and I like you, so I think you deserve good things to happen to you, so this win is what you are due as a reward for being nice.” Which is possibly even more insulting to the other runners than the previous meaning, but also sets up quite a dangerous worldview in which one’s expectation that moral virtue translates into material rewards is likely to run catastrophically up against reality sooner rather than later.
The thing about sport, of course, is that it’s so definitive. You win a race by being faster than the others. You win a game by scoring more points than the other. There’s no debate about that - there’s a way to win, and you either do it or you don’t.
Except there is a debate, of course. Even in sport, where everything is black and white, you’re going to pretty often hear people say that the loser “deserved” to win more than the winner did. Because they actually played better, but got unlucky.
And of course the very nature of sporting fandom carries a whiff of the above “moral” argument, i.e. you always kind of feel like your side deserved to win more than the other, because your attachment to that side means that for you, they carry a moral superiority that means that even when they play much worse than the opposition, they didn’t really deserve to lose. Not in a philosophical sense.
It is instructive to look at the 2023 Ashes. Most of England, judging by the media coverage, believed their team deserved to win the series.
Given the series was drawn 2-2, and one game was ruined by rain despite England dominating it, you can see why on purely sporting grounds the fans might feel dudded of a deserved victory. But the sense of injustice went further in these Ashes: the English consensus was that England had actually deserved to win, not just the series, but the two tests they lost.
In the second test they deserved to win because Australia stumped Jonny Bairstow in a mean and underhanded way, so England deserved victory on the basis of not being mean and underhanded. In the first test they deserved to win because they played bold and entertaining and aggressive cricket, and Australia didn’t, so England deserved victory on the basis of being braver and more fun than the miserable boring Australians.
In both of those cases, England had no claim to victory either on the basis of the statistical requirements of winning a cricket match, or on the basis of clearly having played better. But fans, journalists and the England players themselves expressed great dissatisfaction that an injustice had been done.
And that’s because even in sport, where the lines are clear and things are more unambiguous than in any other area of life, our brains remain infected by the “deserve” bacteria. And if sport’s not immune, what chance have we got anywhere else?
The thing about the whole concept of “deserve” is that it’s imaginary. It’s something we made up, as part of our attempt to construct a framework by which we can both understand and to some extent control our world. But it doesn’t really work, because it’s a concept that encourages us to believe the world is otherwise than what it is. And even worse, it’s a concept that encourages us to make the world worse than it has to be.
I have often heard people say, “Everyone deserves to be happy”. To which I (want to but never really do) say, “Really? Everyone?” I mean, let’s cut to the chase here. Let’s hit the big button instantly:
Did Hitler deserve to be happy?
Come on, no messing about: did he?
It’s quite likely you don’t think he did. It’s quite likely you reckon that Hitler, by what some might term his questionable behaviour, forfeited his moral entitlement to happiness.
OK, so Hitler is the exception. Did Stalin deserve to be happy? Ceaucescu? What if we bring the scale down a bit? Let’s say Charles Manson. Did he deserve to be happy?
At some point we can draw a line, and maybe say “Everyone below Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t deserve to be happy”. People can differ on where that line is. Maybe you reckon happiness is only deserved by people at a sub-Mel Gibson level of reprehensibility. But still, you’re drawing the line somewhere. You don’t really believe that everyone deserves happiness. Not if you think about it.
Or maybe you do. Maybe you literally think that everyone deserves happiness, even Hitler and Mel Gibson and Countess Bathory. Which means you’re saying that just existing as a human being is enough to deserve happiness, and “everyone deserves happiness” is as meaningful a statement as “everyone deserves a spleen”.
Politicians do this all the time. “Australians deserve a world class health care system”. “All children deserve a quality education”.
Well, why do they? What did they do to deserve these things? Whatever it is, it’s quite a coincidence that every child has qualified. It’s incredible that every single Australian possesses the singular virtue that makes them worthy of great health care.
The problem is the weaponisation of “Deserve” to add a personal moral dimension to questions of what is good and what is bad.
It is good for people to be happy, and it is not good for people to not be happy. The more happy people in the world, the better the world is. This applies whether or not the people “deserve it” or not. But we yearn for cosmic justice, we desperately want the universe to be an entity that rewards us for being good, so we put a spin on the simple proposition that happiness is good and unhappiness is bad, and make happiness something that we have earned.
Likewise, those politicians don’t really mean that Australians deserve good health care or that children deserve good education. What they mean is that Australians SHOULD HAVE good health care, and children SHOULD HAVE good education. Australia will be a much better place if our health is taken care of and our kids are well educated. But that’s true even if we’re all arseholes and our kids are scum. In fact you could argue that putting in place these quality services will reduce the incidence of arseholery and scumminess - give them to people who don’t deserve them and maybe they’ll start to. Not that that’s the main reason we should do it. The main reason we should do it is that it’s good for people to be healthy and educated no matter what their personalities are like.
But politicians don’t want to just say, “it will be good to do this”. They want to say, “You deserve this”. Because when you tell people you’re giving them something because they deserve it, you do two things:
You flatter them, so they will like you more.
You push your opponents into a corner, because the debate has shifted. It’s no longer, “is this good or is this bad?” It’s “do you agree that Australians deserve good things or that they don’t?” What response can one give to that?
So, who cares if we say this? Who cares if, instead of saying, “Everyone should be happy” we say “everyone deserves to be happy”? Who cares if politicians promote their policies with tricky language, as long as they’re good policies, and we can tell the difference between good and bad anyway?
Well, let me tell you, folks…
The first issue is personal. On an individual level, I promise you that there is no surer path to misery than in believing in the idea of “deserving”. It’s the perfect way to drive yourself into chronic sadness.
It is super easy for me to believe that I deserve the bad things that have happened in my life. In fact, maybe I do. I can tell you some pretty depressing things about myself, and I can also refer you to numerous people who will assure you that I deserve every single thing that I get, and more.
The question is, what good does this do? What good does it do me? What good does it do the people who love me? What good does it do the people who hate me? What good does it do the world in general?
If I sit around spiralling into ever-deeper melancholia, figuratively beating myself over the head because I think I deserve to be punished for my sins, who does that benefit? If I’ve been a negative force in the world previously, and thus deserve to be miserable, how does being miserable turn me into a positive force in the world now?
Or to put it very bluntly, how does a sad cunt make things better than a happy cunt would?
It doesn’t.
We want the people we don’t like to be sad. We want them to suffer. Because we have been conditioned to think that people should get what they deserve, and if people don’t get what they deserve it offends our sense of justice. It makes us feel the world is all wrong.
But the world is what it’s always been. What people deserve has never affected what they get, and waiting for it to do so is just going to make you angry and bitter.
It’s also going to get in the way of you making any positive difference to the world around you, because you’ll be so wrapped up in what the invisible hand of “deserve” is or isn’t doling out that you forget to worry about what is actually good or bad, here in the real world.
So what about the flipside? What about people who do deserve good things? Isn’t it nice to tell someone they deserve good things?
Well, sure. As long as you don’t take that too seriously. Because if you believe you deserve good things, and don’t get them, you’ll really get in a funk. And if you believe you deserve good things, and you do get them, you’ll risk becoming an egotistical prick and founding a megachurch.
But the personal side of “deserve” is much the lesser evil. In fact it’s often not an evil at all - while you don’t want to get wrapped up in the concept, there are areas where it might be useful. Teaching children that good behaviour has rewards, for example, is a good thing - though you also have to teach them a bit later that when you get to be an adult you have to accept that those rewards might come in the form of a warm fuzzy feeling inside and nothing more.
The much worse part is that public part. That “All children deserve good schools” part. The use of “Deserve” as a basis for policy.
Here’s where it gets super nasty. Because once you introduce “deserving” as a fundamental principle for organising society, you necessarily introduce “undeserving” as the same.
“Deserve” is behind pretty much all the cruellest actions a government takes. As soon as you make the decision that, say, welfare distribution is based on who deserves it most, rather than who needs it most, you have set yourself on the road to bastardry.
“Why should we pay people not to work?”
“We can’t incentivise laziness”
“Why aren’t we rewarding hard work and initiative?”
These are the catchcalls of the true believers in Deserve, who will happily let any fellow human being starve, if they didn’t deserve to eat.
The true believers are vocal on refugees too. We can’t be seen to accept asylum seekers who don’t deserve to be accepted, can we?
They didn’t go through the proper channels!
The paid money to criminals!
They’re not poor enough to be real refugees!
We don’t look at people begging for our help and say, we will help those who need it. We look at people begging for our help and say, we will help those who deserve it.
And that’s as brutal an attitude as you can take. An attitude that starts with flattering the populace, telling them they deserve all the good things, and if you vote for us you’ll get them…
And ends with flattering the populace, telling them that the people not like them deserve nothing, and if you vote for us they’ll get it.
I’m asking you to reject “deserve”. I’m asking you to understand that the world is hard, and the world is unfair, and believing it to be otherwise will never help anyone. I’m asking you to try to be happy no matter what, and never question whether you deserve it or not - and to support everyone else to do the same. I’m asking you, when faced with a decision that will affect your fellow human beings, to make that decision based on what you think will result in the best possible world for us all, rather than on what you think anyone deserves.
Because “deserve” doesn’t matter. There’s good and bad, there’s happy and unhappy, there’s winning a race and losing a race. There’s no “deserve”. We’ll all be better off if we stop believing there is.