Gimme Mine" was the official anthem for the dot-com boom, and still echoes wherever people expect dividends without investment. Drug companies aggressively market the belief that every physical or mental limitation can be fixed with a pill, and rake in billions when we buy it. Ever since learning lost its value as a worthy end in itself, it had to be made fun and easy; today's parents need the dazzle of games to sneak reading and math skills into their children. A musician writes a popular book called Effortless Mastery, based on the premise that you can't execute a wrong note. People buy gas-guzzling vanity vehicles and slam gargantuan homes on tiny plots, distorting whole neighborhoods (but not their own views), then complain it's exhausting to furnish all those rooms (one family's reported solution: using their spare "great room" as an indoor skate park for their kids).

After years of gorging on fast food, a customer sues the franchise for not explicitly warning that it wasn't good for him; someone else wins after spilling their too-hot coffee, which she'd been cradling in her lap while driving. The state pushes gambling with a catchy theme song that disguises the gimme as altruism: "If I had a million dollars, I would buy you a house."

Initially, Sept. 11 offered the temporary illusion that we'd outgrown all this narcissism. The catastrophe merged us in grief and pride and jolted us out of self-absorption. But that great, cleansing flow of compassion couldn't last -- like a flash flood, it altered the landscape, but not the ground. It wasn't long before people were finding ways to make money from the disaster, straining their personal victimhood to grab a moment in the spotlight (or a check from the Red Cross), and finally diluting the concept of hero to include everyone associated with the event.

Now some families are complaining because their victim compensation -- already as unprecedented as the calamity itself -- doesn't sufficiently reflect the earning capacity of the person they lost.

However did the United States get to this sorry place? The entitlement surge draws much of its power from resentment: at the packaged, overdubbed teen idol-du-jour who gets rich shaking her belly-button ring, the athlete who makes more tossing balls for a year than a busload of dedicated teachers can make in five, the CEOs who plead cluelessness after looting shaky companies and decimating pensions (increasing the widespread conviction that everyone else is getting away with something, so gimme MINE!).

The baby boomers, pickled in self-indulgence at an early age, have spilled it all over their children. Famous for resisting authority, now this time they're up against the Big Ones: aging and death. Their supreme boomer confidence newly tinged with panic, they're still swatting at anything that denies or diminishes their self-image, stampeding for Botox and other chemical correctives in the smug expectation of eternal youth, potency and a full head of hair.

Their world is full of breathless entitlements, served up like a dessert bar in Paradise: all you can eat, with every calorie removed. Lose weight while you sleep! Get the loan you deserve! Had an accident? We'll help you profit from it! A quick online search for "self-help" books delivered 29,617 options for sale, including the two best sellers Think and Grow Rich and Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength. Psychotherapy is being phased out in favor of coaching, which claims to offer increased fulfillment without all that tedious introspective stuff. And with each new promise of reward without effort, a big fat Greek chorus warbles in the background, singing the song of entitlement, "Gimme mine!"

One management consultant blames the entitlement epidemic on America's long run of prosperity. In Danger in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom -- How to Break the Entitlement Habit That's Killing American Business (AMACOM, 255 pages, $16.95), a corporate cookbook with little general appeal, author Judith Bardwick remembers when companies could afford to tolerate dead weight and didn't hold people accountable for their performance.

"We stopped judging," she says, but in fact we haven't: We've just streamlined the process by making it shallow, slapping preprinted labels on new data as they zoom in and pile up. While E-Z filing is one way to deal with information overload, it corrodes our capacity to evaluate below the surface.

Philip Roth explores the awful consequences of such superficiality in his blistering, timely novel The Human Stain (Vintage, 361 pages, $14), railing against "a generation that is proud of its shallowness," Roth writes. "The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty, ... all the rapacity hidden under the sincerity. This wonderful language they all have -- that they appear to BELIEVE -- about their 'lack of self-worth,' while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything. ... It's a con these kids have going. The hyperdramatization of the pettiest emotions."

The motivation behind the drama is detailed in The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Pascal Bruckner (Algora, 300 pages, $19.95).

Bruckner, an award-winning French essayist (and / or his uncredited translator) can turn a lively phrase: Michael Jackson's latest face is described as "a cross between Dracula and Bambi." Bruckner equates "innocence" with immaturity -- the expectation that our needs will be met without any reciprocal obligations -- and blames much of it on our ever-shrinking world. He believes the intrusive, competitive jostling of cultures and concerns, with its incessant demand of images and voices, has driven us into defensive withdrawal and selfishness.

One consequence is that we age without growing up, becoming perennial adolescents: fretful, spoiled and easily bored. Flattered by advertisers "who assure us of our right to perfect happiness, ... a slow elevator or ATM makes us scream."

Conservatives claim that once we started giving automatic privileges to those not born white and male and began "coddling" criminals who had rotten childhoods, we tilted the playing field and permanently detached action from accountability in the national psyche. Liberals claim that our president is the ultimate example of succeeding by connection, rather than accomplishment, and cringe at his role-model syntax. But you don't have to agree to notice that hard work and merit are increasingly irrelevant to success.

Meanwhile, we stoke our emotions safely by using other people's troubles for entertainment, "sniff[ing] out adversity with the zeal of a dog digging up truffles," as Bruckner puts it.

Certainly the media emphasis on catastrophe encourages "skin-deep sentimentality," where "one beautiful sob is immediately driven out by another."

This exaltation of pseudopathos creates a kind of sweepstakes of suffering.

"Everyone aspires to be taken for an underdog," says Bruckner, which results in "victimization gone berserk -- metastasizing through the social body." He criticizes "the great temptation to cultivate miseries like hothouse plants in order to derive benefit from them," following the guiding principle of "I suffer, therefore I am worthy." (Gimme mine.) But feigning misfortune is "scandalous" because "it usurps the place of the truly afflicted." It also muddies our perception; "the religion of obligatory whining" prevents us from recognizing real tragedy.

Bruckner's incisive observations appeared before Sept. 11, the day no one could ignore the massive distinction between tragedy and whining. The horrors electrified the world into a genuine outpouring of kindness and fellowship.

The fear that crashed into our lives that bright September day has never faded, unlike the transient warmth of openly embracing each other, when the honest, vital and precious things stood out clearly from the trivial, the selfish and the manipulated. We are back to normal now. Gimme mine.

Judith Schlesinger is a psychologist, jazz critic, educator and author. Her last book was a biography of Humphrey Bogart, and she is now working on Dangerous Joy: The Mad Musician and Other Creative Myths. She has a doctorate in psychology.