makeshiftmind

A point of failure in the recent psychological theories of behaviorism and strict materialism has been the absence of the concept of “responsibility”. Everyone has an answer to the problems of our time, and they usually carry the underlying theme of environmental/cultural adjustment as opposed to promoting personal responsibility. A prime example of this was the failed housing project Pruitt-Igoe, which occupied significant real-estate on the St. Louis riverfront in the 1960s-70s. It was constructed under the assumption that by changing the environment of the poor, the moral and social problems, such as drug use, crime, and poverty could be eliminated. The project became a colossal failure, and in 1972 the project was razed to the ground. Instead of helping the poor, it had created “a worse place to live than the slums it replaced.”[1]

Unfortunately, the “Pruitt-Igoe mentality” still exists. I spend a lot of time listening to “conservative” talk radio, and even the self-styled bastions of morality have bought into the subtle lie that a person’s behavior is controlled solely by events or situations that are beyond their ability to affect, and that the consequences of their actions should be justly removed from them because of this fact. This is evidenced by the growing number of “temporary insanity” pleas in our court system, and the rising number of frivolous lawsuits by people who, among other things, insist that they were inflicted involuntarily with obesity. This twisted version of “social engineering” has single-handedly established the biggest buck-passing civilization in history.

The answer seems simple enough: instead of accepting excuses, we should demand that people act responsibly and accept whatever consequences arise from their actions. Consequences can be good as well as bad, however–the person who works hard receives, as a consequence of his labor, promotions, bonuses, vacation time, etc. Likewise, the person who robs a bank receives orange coveralls, prison bars, and two hours of sunlight a day. In either case, the person receives their due in full.

Perhaps the reason that responsibility is no longer promoted is because it rests on a foundation of individualism, which has of late gone out of vogue. Responsibility requires an empathic dedication to the concept of individual, voluntary action. A collective system, in contrast, emphasizes not only the distribution of positive consequences (i.e., wealth or “self-esteem”, such as the tendency to ride the wave of someone else’s success), but negative consequences as well (i.e., collective “sin”, either of the religious kind, such as original sin, or the social kind, such as the implicit guilt of racism inherited by all white men). In this collectivized system everyone is responsible, and so no one is responsible. We can all blame the “collective”, and escape blaming ourselves, evading responsibility and insisting that, “if only things had been different…” we, too, would have been the same.

Mathematically, the emphasis on dispersing responsibility throughout the masses is an attempt to achieve an average in a set of numbers. In any given set where the numbers are varied, the average will always be less than some and greater than others. In any given social system, the responsibility both for good and bad will fall less on some and greater on others. When averaging occurs, this responsibility is removed from the shoulders of those most responsible, and added to the shoulders of those least responsible, until the proportion is equalized. Therefore, while the poor receive unearned wealth and the rich are plundered, the innocent receive unearned guilt and the guilty are declared innocent. The distribution goes both ways. It is my guess that most of my readers can identify with the frustration of having to abide by an increasing number of meticulous laws that have all arisen because a select few have acted irresponsibly. Instead of paying the due penalty for their crimes, the weight of guilt is transferred to society where individuals become innocent until proved guilty–where everyone is a terrorist, or a drug dealer, or a child abuser–all because personal responsibility, and the social expectation of it, has all but died.

[1] Leonard, Mary Delach. “PRUITT-IGOE HOUSING COMPLEX”. St. Louis Post Dispatch. 01/13/2004. .

I run into a lot of Conservative Christians who think that government legislation is the answer to the attacks on institutional marriage in our culture. When I object to this, I get funny reactions, as if I had three heads or an arm protruding from my chest. However, I have found an excellent article on Reason.com that is a timely Valentine’s message, asserting that love is beyond the jurisdiction of the state. From the article:

It is time to privatize marriage. If the institution is really so sacred, it should lie beyond the withering hands of politicians and policy makers in Washington D.C. There should be no federal or state license that grants validity to love. There should be no state-run office that peers into our bedrooms and honeymoon suites. If the church thinks divorce and homosexuality are problematic, it should initiate the real dialogue to address these problems in-house rather than relying on state-sponsored coercion to affirm doctrinal beliefs. And if tax-codes and guardianships need some classification for couples, let’s revise civil union standards to reflect those needs.

“…one day my ashes will return to earthly slumber, spread far and wide across the desert and the sea
until then i will live each day in awe and wonder, look forward to each sunrise…”
–Stavesacre

It is a fact that people do not live forever. There is something about the finitude of life that demands respect for the opportunities we and people that we encounter. To some, this finitude may seem troubling–to others, it may seem insignificant–but to me, it seems all the more precious for its scarcity, like a rare metal that holds its value precisely because it is in limited supply.

In general, I’ve observed two attitudes in respect to living life: the first is passivity, where an individual waits for life to bring people, experiences, or success his way. The second is active engagement, where the individual takes life by the reigns and molds it like an artist at his craft–making something beautiful within the limits of his own experience.

This attitude toward life is reminiscent of a familiar phrase, well articulated in the film
Dead Poet’s Society.

“Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? — Carpe — hear it? — Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.”

Although the movie possesses some radical existential overtones, the message is not lost to its shortcomings.

The assumptions necessary to live the active, “aggressive” life are: 1) that the individual is not only capable, but morally right in living life to the fullest extent possible; 2) in situations beyond the individual’s control, they sill possess the ability to react to their circumstances in the manner of their choosing; and 3) that no person can live life for anyone else–each individual must expect his happiness to be the result of his own efforts, and must never live at the expense of others.

I have learned that life, happiness, and fulfillment are NOT granted to men and women automatically. They cannot be gained as a free hand-out from an unknown benefactor, or won as a lottery in which the individual’s investment is minute. These things CAN be achieved, but ONLY in proportion to the work exerted to achieve them. Any attempt to harvest a field without first sowing it would be nonsense.

I believe that most people sincerely wish to get the most out of their lives, but they are either misinformed about the true nature of happiness, or they exercise the wrong methods of achieving it. Some think the greatest happiness comes from overindulgence, some think it comes from the praise of others, some think it comes from the acquisition of material goods, and some think it comes from never having to exert themselves. All of these are flawed because they fail to take into account “human nature”, or “objective human attributes”.

In the first case, the law of diminishing returns will eventually destroy an individual who exercises excessive gratification, because their mind will continue to crave the effects of a particular pleasure while their body will continue to become immune to its effects. In the second case, praise may be a very good thing if it is received in response to exerted effort–i.e., if it is earned by some degree of action on the part of the recipient, else it is most likely false praise or flattery. It also lacks a degree of self-sufficiency, because the recipient is always at the mercy of the whims of others to measure his self-worth. The third case involves a backward view of material goods in which a person believes that the “things” he desires will give him some sort of “status”–as if the “thing” makes the man, and not vice versa. Finally, in the case of slothfulness, it is a well-known fact that real pride can only accompany accomplishments of significance. Genuine self-esteem only comes through genuine self-improvement, which includes self-discipline, hard work, and a healthy enjoyment of what is earned.

To some degree, these errors crouch in the subconscious of most individuals. The desire to have something for nothing is very strong, but the truth is that such an arrangement actually damages our humanity by reducing us to passivity, and thereby depriving us of our means of survival and self-definition. It gives men the excuses of “fate”, “destiny”, “luck”, “predestination”, “behaviorism”, and a host of other philosophical reductionistic ideas that turn men into machines instead of willing, active agents.

Every day that I live I feel more attached to this world and the experiences that is has to offer. If one does not live for happiness (as defined here), the only other option is to live for misery — and who is motivated by that?

I’ve added a link to my “navigation” box on the left that points you to Mozilla.org’s Firefox browser. This is the web browser you should be using. Not only does it offer superior protection against intrusive malware, it also sports a variety of extensions that help web surfers like myself be more productive. Currently, I have the following extensions installed:

Bookmarks Synchronizer
Allows you to connect to an FTP server and store your bookmarks in XML format, which can be downloaded on other computers. This is very helpful if, like me, you use multiple computers for either home or office, and you want your bookmarks available to all of them.

Sage
Sage is an RSS news reader that skims RSS enabled websites and generates a rather nifty report of all the new articles/news items on that site. It can manage many different RSS feeds.

Web Developer
This toolbar is the ultimate html snooping tool. It allows the viewer to break down a web page into its separate elements, and see technical info such as form field names/values, CSS design schemes, table structures, span and div tags, etc.

A quick-search feature is also built into the browser, which lets you use common search engines such as Google and Yahoo without having to leave the current page that you’re on. Firefox even supports quick searches for many other informational sites. Currently, I have the following quick-search plugins installed:

Google, Yahoo, Amazon, NASB Bible, CDDB, Creative Commons, Dictionary.com, Ebay (why? I don’t know…), Fox News, Google Glossary, IMDB, MySQL Documentation, Perldoc, PHP Documentation, Slashdot, Whois Source, Wikipedia, and Yahoo News.

Many more search engine plug-ins can be found here.

If you haven’t migrated away from M$ Interbloat Exploder, then you really do need to try Firefox. It even migrates all of your favorites, cookies, cache, history, and other settings, so you don’t have to worry about loosing anything. So do yourself a favor, and kick the habit–put IE where it belongs and join the legions of converts. Install Firefox today.