Responsibility

Wrote this before the concept of blogs was imagined! More true today...

America is faced with a shortage of personal responsibility at every level of society. In America, pre-World War II, the churches, the schools and the families inculcated the standards of acceptable behavior. New generations learned the established and agreed upon customs of cooperative and civilized behavior very much as they learned a mother tongue. Starting with the psychedelic 1970's, we have been encouraged to do our own thing and all the traditional concepts of right and wrong have been replaced by a psychological approach to values: instead of being taught that there are absolutes by which they must abide, children are taught, "You'll feel better, if you do the right thing." Thus, having replaced moral concepts of good and evil with therapeutic categories of desire and feeling, we have lost the ability to instill a sense of character in young people and will likely continue to produce new generations of cultural orphans. Character is about one's adherence to moral principles and the standards of conduct that distinguish right from wrong.

Moral principles are not relative to the revisionist history of the moment. A clear lack of personal responsibility is when the President of the United States can admit that he lied to the American people, but urges the American people to be angry with Congress for making an issue of his lying - and they agree. The philosophical basis of this new lack of personal responsibility is rooted in determinism, the argument that people have no control over anything they choose to do, since everything anyone ever does is the result of a chain of causes. In order to fill the void of moral accountability, Americans generally rely on the courts to support the moral underpinnings of our culture which among other consequences results in piles of regulations and commensurate numbers of lawyers. As an example, most pundits agree that runaway medical costs could be seriously checked by tort reform. During the 1980’s Americans did collectively start accepting greater personal responsibility for their actions. This new attitude impacted social programs, as people questioned the assumption that unequal distribution of wealth is always society's fault. More recently, both intellectual and financial success have been demonized and we are moving away from the traditional American value that people are responsible for their own lives.

Dr. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish physician incarcerated in one of Hitler's concentration camps. From that experience, he developed a new school of psychiatry; based on the premise that mental wellness is not achieved by helping the individual understand what caused his psychological problems, but by taking action to resolve the problem. When Dr. Frankl lectured in the United States, he would conclude with a plea for Americans to erect a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast because, he declared, freedom requires a balance between those two ideals, liberty and responsibility.