It's not just conservatives, I also see many libs believe in this shit. In addition, they really believe in the "Just World Hypothesis" (i.e. that the good will eventually be rewarded and that the evil will eventually be punished). I just can't bring myself to believe that the evil will "get what they deserve," at least in this world, after everything I've seen. I don't know, how do others here deal with the brainworms of personal responsibility and the just world hypothesis?
Another thing that's annoying is that a lot of these people seem to think that humans are unfeeling robots. Sure, you could go to college while working full time at Walmart and learn to code, but realistically, how many people are going to have the discipline to quite literally deprive themselves of a basic human existence outside of their work to grapple with difficult/ardous coursework in what little spare time a 40-60 hour workweek affords them? This is not to mention familial obligations and whatever else a person might need to deal with outside of themselves. Basing your society around an ideal that only a very select few people can meet (and those that do ironically are usually already at an advantage) seems like a good way to wind up with an incredibly dysfunctional society wherein the vast majority of those who can't are simply discarded and left to their own devices and those that can are stuck in perpetual state of anxiety and fear because they know that those that couldn't view them with resentment, and that their own station in life is not as secure as they think it is
These people love to accept that if something is a even remote possibility, it might as well apply to all cases. If there is a chance an overworked minimum wage worker goes to school and eventually gets an office job, that means the system works as intended and the particulars don't matter, what matters somehow is the person's mindset or personal ambition. It's just an intense lack of sympathy from what I see. They love to point to specific examples too of people going from poverty to financial stability and assume every single person could replicate that path without fault if they just perform the same actions.
I've been contextualizing it a while that a lot of people assume the real world operates like Minecraft. In that there are freely and readily available resources everywhere and intended functions of those resources, and all you have to do is find the right things and put everything together and then hey you've got a house and a garden. You win.
I see this an aspect of this often in places like AITA, where everyone collectively forgets that people get upset or tired or hungry or try to avoid embarassment. Even when it's apparent that someone is acting from such a cause, it all has to get collapsed down to who's right and who's wrong. This even compounds the issue, because if someone has a reason for why they said something nasty to their brother in law or whatever, but they're still judged to be in the wrong, people tend to inflate the offense so that any complexity to the interaction is less important.
That's a tangent, but the point is that people really want our emotions and behaviour to be wholly suppressed by abstracted social mores and ill-defined ettiquette and rules. This is simply not where we are! We're animals, and a scared animal will bite. We have to work with this rather than just say everyone has to be better and then heap all of our pent up abuse and the inherent systemic violence on whoever gets caught out needing a twix, or who doesn't have the wherewithal to be a fucking striver while they're grinding out at an abusive job. I want to ask people all the time, "have you ever been angry, have you ever been afraid?" you can't think straight. Like you literally can't process information in the same way because your brain prioritizes "be aware and ready to avoid or confront a threat" at the expense of whatever dispassionate evaluation everyone enjoys when they hear about something from the outside, after the fact.
And it's not like we have to just say, "well, everyone can just do whatever they want because they're only reacting to their experience," no! But we have to understand how it fucking happens and how to work with real, temperamental human beings. Sometimes that means forgiving an outburst, sometimes it means taking a lap to cool off before you talk to someone. Sometimes it means acknowledging that it's very unlikely for a person to be able to work full time, improve themselves, manage their household, and also go the extra mile to maintain best practices in everything while building a surplus to get ahead.
kind of a rant, but this shit is in my head a lot.
I dunno who exactly Justin Feldman is, but I saw this really good article the other day, a sort of look at the Biden admin’s response to Covid.
It’s… really wild to see it all piled up lol, but yeah “personal responsibility to determine your own acceptable risk levels” seems to be how they’re washing their hands of responsibility
It’s nuts, but it helps us remember that colonial states are ALL fake
Literally what people like Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp (GA governor) where saying 18 months ago.
bruh, a huge amount of the world (something above 50% but below 75~%)* lives in poverty, did billions of people make the decision to abdicate their personal responsibility and just live in miserable squalor because they fucking like it!?
*https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/nearly-half-the-world-lives-on-less-than-550-a-day
It's not that the individual decisions people make in their lives don't matter, because they definitely do, but the problem is that some people have absolutely garbage choices that will lead them to the same shitty outcomes regardless of what choices they make, even if a lot of those were objectively good choices given their circumstances
These people assume most of the world outside of America is a pit of filth infested with genetically inferior people who don't matter. Or they'll just shrug. Or they'll do an equally disgusting thing of venerating poverty in foreign countries by connecting it to stronger communities or spirituality or something. Most Americans believe rest of the world only exists for tourism or treats, or that it doesn't exist at all.
Ah, but you see, those people hate freedooomssszzz and if they just colour revolutioned their government they'd be allowed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by signing an indenture contract with United Fruit Company.
Dude, I just rant about it with my friends. I cannot stand liberals talking about how you're fine if you've got the shot. It's putting individualist ideology over literal human lives, we live in a sick society.
Personal responsibility isn't inherently wrong. The idea that someone should do something as an individual is a way to maintain safety and decent social relations. So sometimes it's possible to ignore it or hope it's not brain worms.
Most of the time, though, it is toxic brain worm shit from liberalism, the protestant work ethic, and reactionary (etc) reasoning given down to us from the ruling class and self-replicating social values. Things that should not be personal responsibility are made so in order to deflect blame from systemic problems and systemic causes, particularly those created by the owner class.
Environmental responsibilities are a good example. Taking fewer flights is good for the environment and thinking that we should all do that is also fine. But bullshit thinking that it's enough or even primary is implicit in extreme liberal nagging over such things. You can't reform or replace the transportation network and electricity production as an individual, but that's what is necessary to solve the problem.
You can see this deflection in real time whenever a politician advocates for systemic reforms. There's always a desperate search for some personal hypocrisy like how many flights they take or how big their house is. This acts to distract you from the scale and nature of the problem, refocusing it on... individual responsibility. And it's what sticks in the minds of the undecided.
So in terms of how I deal with it, I accept it as a normal but limited thing that's perverted into harmful propaganda by the liberal media apparatus and that Western socialists are going to have to either pierce through that nagging or put up a show of individual responsibility to get our feet in the door. If you are a pol or leader with the means, you probably need to buy solar panels so that you can defend against and even appropriate their talking points.
Also, we kind of do this already for the things we care about, so we need to reconcile our opinions. For all the talk we do of systemic rather than individual analysis and solutions, we sure do hate individual CEOs and crap on a given leftist if they're a landlord or have an expensive house. We all must kill the liberal inside ourselves. Use this as a reminder for doing so!
I'm just a brat about it. I have a hard time mustering up the patience for people I can't imagine listening to my POV.
Name calling, middle fingers, mockingly repeating them, etc.
I used to blame this on Christianity, and notions of original sin and how each individual is either saved or damned for eternity, so it's up to them to choose correctly. I suppose I still do to an extent, but I think I have a more nuanced take now that I'm trying to be a good Marxist and learn more theory (not a flex, I haven't even finished the third chapter of Capital yet). So, all ideologies flow out of the base / mode of production, right? If so, then we would expect Christianity under capitalism to reinforce notions of personal responsibility in religion as that sort of atomization and alienation of humans is an essential component of capitalism. And then if so, then it may be that our only hope to break people out of these notions may be to first change the underlying mode of production? Not sure.
I often thought it was interesting that the interpretation of the bible from within the civilization with the highest prison population is about your personal responsibility to have a personal relationship with God or face harsh punishment.
Right and it's not like concepts like eternal torment or a relationship with God only emerged out of capitalism per se, but it's a matter of development and emphasis. Evangelicals (and even Catholics, I think) would be shocked to see just how different their religion was under feudalism and under the slave system in the Roman Empire.
So, what's funny is that original sin doesn't necessarily lead to personal responsibility. Indeed, when original sin is taken to its most extreme (to the point where, because of it, our own intellect is corrupt/fallen), then it actually turns back on itself (hegelian!) and makes it so that nothing that you do can be just/right on its own. This is actually what Luther and Calvin picked up on, with the unfortunate side effect of turning to an obsession with labor and work in a calling (this is from Weber) to basically prevent the psychic damage that really reckoning with original sin causes. There's a similar potential for pessimism with historical materialism, BTW (i.e. it's all deterministic ), so turning to Christianity is a good impulse to understand the idea of "personal responsibility".
So my take on this is (based on my reading, etc - i'm writing a diss on it) is that Augustine actually accepted the implications of grace and original sin fully, and he turned back to other humans. In the Confessions there's a bit where he says "weep with me if you have charity," so like, it's not so much about personal responsibility as it is about mutual suffering and sympathy. In Augustine we can find a lot of useful ways of thinking about historical materialism and human agency, since he basically suggests that agency, on its own, is weak and futile. For Augustine, it has to be joined to God's grace, but as materialists we can substitute in something like "class consciousness/worker solidarity" and recognize the same solution to the problem. After all we generally don't buy into "Great man" ideas of power and agency - these things are systemic instead.
So, all ideologies flow out of the base / mode of production, right? If so, then we would expect Christianity under capitalism to reinforce notions of personal responsibility in religion as that sort of atomization and alienation of humans is an essential component of capitalism.
To some extent what you're doing is flipping Weber's thesis - which I think is acceptable, especially now. If maybe Luther/Calvin were earnestly trying to avoid the real psychic damage of losing all agency (predestination is a hell of a drug), at this point in capitalist development the direction has been reversed, and in America you can see it w/ prosperity gospel, etc. If you really believe Christianity, how could you possibly support capitalist production? Only by interpreting these things through capitalist production/ideology which says that the capitalist has merit based on his wealth (which, I should note, Augustine entirely abjures these sorts of merits. He makes it really clear in * City of God* that these sorts of things are arbitrary and not a sign of virtue or "saved-ness"). Changing the mode of production then will either cause some heinous backlash or transformation.
However, while the material conditions need to change, we can also operate in the realm of ideology, since there are dominant, residual, and emergent strains (raymond williams). If we pick up the "real Christianity" from the ashes at the same time as we move forward to an emergent socialist consciousness, it is possible to further heighten the cognitive dissonance between Capitalism and Christianity, and perhaps cause people to if not incur psychic damage, at least break the capitalist/christanity lockstep.
