Misreadings Of Responsibility

Many people speak in favor of personal responsibility; but many of them have confused ideas as to what that means.

If responsibility means being accountable for your actions, then that idea is a rightful one. However that is not how responsibility has been defined. Responsibility – and its sister concept success – have been defined as having a huge house and a Hummer. That is not responsibility; it is irresponsibility. It is reckless overconsumption that makes things ugly for the planet and its inhabitants. Nor is it success; it is letting your life be run by other people.

I had a counselor who told me that I needed to be responsible for my life. When I said what I wanted to do with my life, she said that I was grandiose. These two statements are mutually contradictory. If my life is my responsibility then it is mine to do with whatever I want to do with it. And if my life is not what I want to do with it, then my life is not my responsibility.

Far be it from me to impugn business. I am friends with a number of businessmen who are excellent people, and I find what they do to be right. Far be it from me to embrace Communism. I wrote a detailed deconstruction of Communist ideology (https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatthought/refuting-marxism-once-and-for-all). But it is completely rightful to impugn error. And here we see hideous error all across the board.

Once again, the correct path is to define what is responsibility. It is not driving a Hummer and having a huge house. And no, I am not driven in this by envy or anything of the sort. I lived in mansions on two different occasions. I find it happiest to live humbly, as I do now, even as I do my work for a political information site.

I am not lazy; I work hard, and I have proven my willingness to work hard in any number of ways. Nor am I irresponsible; I have a more thorough definition of what responsibility is. The true concept of responsibility is this: Leave the world a better place than you have found it. And until people are willing to do that they have no business speaking about responsibility.