Posted by
The Proud Liberal on Saturday, April 05, 2008 11:50:20 AM
To evoke the doctrine of personal responsibility is to declare a theory of cause and effect, to wit: "Exercising personal responsibility will cause you to be successful." As I acknowledged to Ex-Wyomingite, exercising personal responsibility can certainly cause some good things to happen to you as an individual. The question is, however, what percentage of what happens to you, i.e., the consequences in your life, are caused by exercising personal responsibility.
Because, to begin with, it's clear that we are not the cause of many things about us or that happen to us. For instance: we do not choose the country we are born in, nor the parents to whom we are born, nor do we choose our parents' social and economic status; we do not choose our sex; we do not choose our innate mathematical ability, we do not choose our innate musical ability; we do not choose our innate athletic ability. We don't choose our good looks, nor our height, nor our body type. We don't choose to be extroverted or introverted. We don't choose our race. We don't choose our intelligence and we may not choose our emotional maturity either.
Our society puts conditions on our opportunities. We accumulate grade point averages and take tests that are evaluated by colleges. We apply to colleges but the colleges we apply to can turn us down or accept us, depending on their evaluation. We take tests to get into graduate school as well, and are in competition with others to be chosen. Graduate schools turn down students every year and the students can't do what they would choose.
Competition and training influence the course of our lives. Tennis players, dancers, chess players, ice skaters, musicians, every ambition can be enhanced by starting as young as possible in training for the future. If you don't start early your competition may be way ahead of you by the time you reach your teen-age years. There will be junior leagues for tennis players and golfers, from which the adult stars of tomorrow will come.
The ambitious person will usually want to join in the societal stream of concentrations already in existence. If you want to be an actor you will probably find it necessary to go to New York or Hollywood; you will need to go to a big city to work for major corporations.
These are all things that personal responsibility doesn't have much effect on, i.e., the things that causes consequences in our lives are external to whatever personal responsibility we exercise. Personal responsibility may be less than a 10% cause in our lives.
The ultimate contradiction for conservatives is that conservatives are very high on competition and for situations in which people compete against each other and only the best are the top winners. A lot of people who have exercised great personal responsibility in their lives will be losers because they are simply not as good as the winners, i.e., an individual can't do whatever they want in this life if only they exercise responsibility, etc.