Is your current state all of your responsibility or is your state caused by external forces?
This is a recent conversation I had on personal responsibility versus societal responsibility.
When something goes wrong who is to blame? Where is the demarcation line between you and society?
My question:
Person: “I was evicted because the company I worked for automated my job. It wasn’t my fault and I now have no money for a place to live or food to eat. I’m in pain and suffering.”
Your response: “I have a solution and it works better than anything else that has ever been tried.
Leaving people free to try to solve their own problems…”
Can I paraphrase that?
“I have a solution…solve your own problems on your own”. Is that accurate?
The response:
Yes. You have your problems right in front of you. You have total control of what you do. There is no need for a five year study or a task force of politicians and experts to convene to come up with a solution to your problem. And what’s even better, the more you try to solve your own problems the more skill and confidence you will develop. And the more you learn that waiting around for the government to solve your problems for you the more helpless and powerless you will become.
So yes. Solving your own problems is the best thing in the world for you. It will work faster and better and it will make you a better person too.
My response:
Teamwork is…
… the collaborative effort of a group to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
This concept is seen within the greater framework of a team, which is a group of interdependent individuals who work together towards a common goal. -Teamwork
Teamwork is often seen as necessary in some endeavors such as sports, business and government.
In sports a team is made of many members with different set of skills and responsibilities.
In business a team is made of many members with different skills and responsibilities.
In government a team is made of many members with different skills and responsibilities.
It’s also called collaboration.
Collaboration is the process of two or more people or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal.
Collaboration is similar to cooperation. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group.
Teams that work collaboratively often access greater resources, recognition and rewards when facing competition for finite resources. — Collaboration
In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants.
There are some social infrastructures that cause social defects. Some groups are externalized by these social defects. These are called externalities.
In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit.
The individuals or groups experiencing problems are exogenous.
An exogenous change is one that comes from outside the model.
When responsibility is laid on an individual or group that did not cause it it’s called misattribute the source of the problem or misattribute causation.
Misattribution causes harm to the individual or group.
It causes stigmatization.
Social stigma is the disapproval of, or discrimination against, a person based on perceivable social characteristics that serve to distinguish them from other members of a society. Social stigmas are commonly related to culture, gender, race, intelligence and health.
>Yes. You have your problems right in front of you. You have total control of what you do.
Without food or water or shelter a person can’t reach homeostasis.
Without food at regular intervals you do not have the energy. You do not have total control.
Without shelter to sleep at regular intervals you do not have rest necessary for executive functioning. You do not have total control.
Sickness is an interruption, cessation, or disorder of a body, system, or organ structure or function.
Sickness comes from many sources but without food and shelter at regular intervals those odds are increased.
>Yes. You have your problems right in front of you. You have total control of what you do.
In perfect health you may have total control of what you do (although you can’t do skills you don’t have) but there are external forces in the world. This is when something is out of your control.
Total control of your self does not guarantee that the income source pool will have an adequate or consistent enough source of income in an amount to purchase food and shelter. There’s no guarantee of that.
To change an individual or groups state from the effects of some of these external forces often require teamwork.
To overcome these external forces require collaboration.
Solidarity is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes.
It refers to the ties in a society that bind people together as one.
Some say that in life you have ups and downs.
Solidarity is saying, “I will be here for you in the ups and downs”.
Some people don’t have that and never had it.
The preamble to the Bill of Rights states that,
We the people …form a more perfect union…to promote the general welfare…
A bill of rights, sometimes called a declaration of rights or a charter of rights, is a list of the most important rights to the citizens of a country. The purpose is to protect those rights against infringement from public officials and private citizens. — Bill of rights
The government is a team effort, a collaboration, a union by the people for the people. It’s solidarity and it’s designed that way.
United we stand means a group effort.
Throughout history there have been groups of people who have stood by and watched as atrocities happen.
One might ask why and how did they get to this point.
For some there is no reason.
What is a psychopath?
Psychopathy is traditionally a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.
It is sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy. Different conceptions of psychopathy have been used throughout history that are only partly overlapping and may sometimes be contradictory. — Psychopathy
Psychopaths, in general, have a hard time forming real emotional attachments with others. Instead, they form artificial, shallow relationships designed to be manipulated in a way that most benefits the psychopath. People are seen as pawns to be used to forward the psychopath’s goals. Psychopaths rarely feel guilt regarding any of their behaviors, no matter how much they hurt others.
What is a sociopath?
Psychology researchers generally believe that psychopaths tends to be born — it’s likely a genetic predisposition — while sociopaths tend to be made by their environment.
In World War II the nazis stood by and watched people be put in concentration camps and put to death.
Some say this was caused by elitism.
Elitism is the belief or attitude that individuals who form an elite — a select group of people with an intrinsic quality, high intellect, wealth, special skills, or experience — are more likely to be constructive to society as a whole, and therefore deserve influence or authority greater than that of others
Some say it’s ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism is the act of judging another culture based on preconceptions that are found in the values and standards of one’s own culture — especially regarding language, behavior, customs, and religion.
These aspects or categories are distinctions that define each ethnicity’s unique cultural identity. Ethnocentrism
Institutionalisation (or institutionalization) refers to the process of embedding some conception (for example a belief, norm, social role, particular value or mode of behavior) within an organization, social system, or society as a whole.
People inside of a group may scape goat those outside of their group.
A scapegoat is a person unfairly blamed for some misfortune.
Some say that misinformation, elitism and scapegoating creates sociopaths.
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information. Examples of misinformation include false rumors, insults and pranks, while examples of more deliberate disinformation include malicious content such as hoaxes, spearphishing, etc.
While the world burns those who have been institutionalized continue to live in denial.
Denial, in ordinary English usage, is asserting that a statement or allegation is not true.
The same word, and also abnegation (German: Verneinung), is used for a psychological defense mechanism postulated by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. — Denial
All that to say that there are people out there who stand by and watch atrocities happen to people who are unable to prevent external forces by themselves and who then misattribute causation to those people.
What is the locus of control?
In personality psychology, locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.
A person’s “locus” (plural “loci”, Latin for “place” or “location”) is conceptualized as internal (a belief that one can control one’s own life) or external (a belief that life is controlled by outside factors which the person cannot influence, or that chance or fate controls their lives).
Individuals with a strong internal locus of control believe events in their life derive primarily from their own actions: for example, when receiving exam results, people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves and their abilities. People with a strong external locus of control tend to praise or blame external factors such as the teacher or the exam. — Locus of Control
It’s safe to say that people with money have more control to go through life than those who don’t. For those without money (or food and shelter) it is nearly impossible to improve their position.
In the conversation above to the person who has money the idea of personal responsibility makes sense. There is nothing else in their way to achieving a goal. If they don’t accomplish something they have no excuse. It’s a lack of motivation on their part.
But those without money have obstacles in front of them that those with money can’t see.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs describes with a certain amount of evidence the human condition:
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review.[2] Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans’ innate curiosity.
His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans.
He then decided to create a classification system which reflected the universal needs of society as its base and then proceeding to more acquired emotions.[3] Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is used to study how humans intrinsically partake in behavioral motivation.
Maslow used the terms “physiological”, “safety”, “belonging and love”, “social needs” or “esteem”, and “self-actualization” to describe the pattern through which human motivations generally move. This means that in order for motivation to occur at the next level, each level must be satisfied within the individual themselves.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental needs at the bottom and the need for self-actualization and transcendence at the top. In other words, the crux of the theory is that individuals’ most basic needs must be met before they become motivated to achieve higher level needs. — Maslow’s Hierarchy
