Responsibility
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.