What's all of your views on personal responsibility? That is...

What's all of your views on personal responsibility? That is, the mentality of blaming yourself for your situation and taking responsibility for your own actions.

Seems to be popular among the right, wondering what the left's take on it is.

When free will almost certainly doesn't exist, what's the point in 'personal responsibility'? Nobody had any choices anyway.

That's what I figured might be the first comment. Almost immediately a free will vs no free will debate sparks.

Some people, lacking self-control, carry out destructive actions detrimental to society as a whole. That's where we step in.

Well, I think it's kind of relevant, don't you?

The right has a hardon for this because they equate everything "left" with a welfare state and so they bank all their ideas on being anti-that. They also are science deniers that gleefully deny that mental illnesses exist that we can clearly see the effects of on brain scans at this point. I remember arguing with a guy on cuckchan that told me he sits in his house all day when not in school, feels bad about himself most of the day and doesn't get up most days if it's an option and his mind constantly loops to the worst possible scenario when he considers changing his life but he wouldn't call himself depressed because that doesn't exist. He said part of the reason why is he doesn't think it's that is people shouldn't make excuses for them self…

Individualism is an overrated quality now and in general, people deny societies influence and necessity even when it's obvious. There is also a cool victim complex in thinking you're an individual of your own merit when in reality that is far from the truth. The words you use to speak and think with are not your own and they make up that bullshit you call a personality by being able to craft a narrative with them about yourself. Hence almost nothing is really individualistic about you except fee fees and I'm told those aren't important by the right all the time so.

Yes and no. Yes in that it'll help people have a finer understanding of how the brain works.

No in that most people IRL don't seem to care enough about it, so talking about it will change little.

If free will doesn't exist (it doesn't) then 'personal responsibility' is meaningless.

And yet that doesn't stop people from believing in it.

I dare you to read /pol threads for 5 minutes and leave with that same belief.

Irrelevant.

Very relevant. Because those are the people who will be voting against you.

You're asking what my views are.

Blame isn't a meaningful concept in a world where everyone's actions are almost entirely determined by the circumstances they find themselves in. Even if free will exists in some sense, it still doesn't make sense to blame individuals because you can't solve problems with blame. The only way to make the world a better place is to understand it as a machine which proceeds in a statistically quantifiable manner.

That's already been established.

So then why does it matter what voters think? I'm so confused

Because they vote.

The sky is blue, the Pope is Catholic, and people are idiots.


Which is why the world is in such a terrible state. I'm not even sure how you expect us to respond at this point…

Are you not interested in a solution? Or are you more set on riding the waves until they crash hard against the wall?

What possible solution do you propose for human stupidity?

Personal responsibility is good to some degree, however the idea that our situation is only a product of your own actions is fucking retarded.

Personal responsibility is 99% virtue signalling.

I've never met a right-winger that would understand those concepts

My objections to the concept of mental illnesses is that there's no objective way of separating the space of all possible minds into categories of "correct" minds and "malfunctioning" minds. It's like trying to separate the space of possible 3-dimensional objects into "good" objects and "bad" objects. It just doesn't make sense.

The only reasonable measure by which a mind can be considered defective is if it believes itself to be defective.

I personally find it important, and think the right-wing argument against welfare has some good points.
That said, I think capitalism and alienated wage labor have corrosive effects on the ethic of hard work and personal responsibility. Compare the work of a skilled laborer or artisan with that of an unskilled shit job- It's a lot harder to feel like you are personally responsible for your own fate when you're performing some interchangeable task that could be easily automated or replaced with cheaper labor- when you're the appendage of a machine, rather than the master of a valuable skill

pro-tip for memes, don't be ignorant like this. You are being counter-productive.

But that's wrong nigger. If that were true, people like myself wouldn't exist.

The responsible of something is the one individual or group on which we can act with the best effectiveness to avoid recidivism.
There's no need of free will or any denial of social determinism, it's only a way to fix things.

Technology was a mistake.

These are the kind of answers I'd expect from Holla Forums. This board is almost as bad as Holla Forums now. You are incurably stupid, so have fun with your LARPing.

This post doesn't make sense because it doesn't solve problems.

...

Absolutely this. The concern for responsibility comes from the concern in deciding who needs to do what. In reality, it seems like Rightists aren't concerned at all with improving the world or individual lives, they just want to blame others so they can believe the world is just as it should be.

Personal responsibility only has any value if you take it to mean personal agency. It's important to believe in agency and not believe that everyone else decides your life and they're at fault and there's nothing you can or should do. Which again goes back to caring more about who to blame than about actually changing anything. The "personal responsibility" side just engages in an endless circlejerking fight with the "collective/societal/parental responsibility" side and doesn't care about how to fix the fucking problem. And while its true the problem is systematic and structural, that doesn't mean you should do nothing or continue behaving as you have because "it isn't my fault".

Hi, Howard.

Trying to isolate an individual thing or concept is meaningless. we can only understand things in their relation to other things. A persons personal responsibility and how well they are at taking it on or doing a certain task is dependent on many things, certainly society must be taken into account no?
In conclusion: to some degree personal responsibility is something everyone tackles, but we cannot isolate the individual from the society. So I find this question malformed

Well put. The concept of mental normalcy and illness is political.


Also well phrased. Personal responsibility is only meaningful on a personal level. On a societal level only the results matter. To take a concrete example: a right-winger may want to prevent sex education 'because it is the personal responsibility of the teens not to have sex', in which case you get a vague moral high ground and a thousand teen moms.
Framing structural problems as the failings of individuals is yet another sign of the liberal ideology permeating our society.

It's just as stupid and bad as blaming society for all of your problems.

A Marxist should understand that there's a dialectical relation between the individual and society. Society is comprised of individuals and individual actions, however, society plays a large role in shaping said individuals and directing their actions and determining their social and material conditions.

The call for "personal responsibility" is a call to ignore the socio-economic causes of individual problems. It's a call to pretend that this relation doesn't exist and we all live in an idealist spirit realm where reality is shaped purely on individual will, and if things don't go so well for you that means you must have lacked sufficient virtue and willpower.

It's a sad excuse by the right to shift the blame of their own actions to the victims of it. Saying to the poor that they are responsible for their own actions while you keep exploiting them is like blaming the person you have poisoned for being unhealthy.

Truly pathetic.