Personal Responsibility: It’s All About Choices

Personal Responsibility: It’s All About Choices

– By Tom Garrison –

I believe the trajectory of American history, culture, and politics is pretty much a straight line of more freedom and equality. Of course, there have been setbacks. But overall, progress has been good.

There is an important part of culture, which influences politics, that seems to have diminished a great deal in importance in the last 50 years or so—personal responsibility. “Character, not circumstances, makes the man.” Booker T. Washington.

What is personal responsibility? Personal responsibility is taking full accountability for your actions, decisions, feelings, and thoughts. I include feelings and thoughts because people generate their feelings and thoughts, and those drive decisions and actions. The exceptions are severely mentally ill people. If they truly are not in control, they are not responsible for their feelings, thoughts, decisions, and actions.

Holding yourself responsible leaves little room for blame games and encourages controlling your own life. There are two things in life that you have total control over, your attitude (feelings and thoughts) and your effort (decisions and behavior). Being self-responsible is being self-aware. Who doesn’t want a responsible and self-aware population?

The flip side of personal responsibility is a sense of entitlement and victimhood. “I should get things and progress in life because it’s my right. If I do bad things, it is because the patriarchy (or your favorite oppressive group—white people, systemic racism, homophobes, the wealthy, capitalism, etc.) made me.” Basically, blame someone else, or some group, for personal failings. People who deny personal responsibility love to play the victim.

Denying personal responsibility also threatens freedom. As Eleanor Roosevelt (activist wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt) noted, “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”

Think of the attributes that make a responsible person: being on time; making an effort; having a positive attitude; using good body language; doing a little extra, being prepared; keeping your word; having a strong work ethic; and so on. All are easily done, require no special talent, and are under a person’s control.

Who could possibly be against personal responsibility? It turns out a huge chunk of Americans. This includes the government at local, state, and federal levels acting so as to further the demise of personal responsibility. This push by all levels of government is buttressed at the individual level by liberals and leftists. Certainly not all people who personally lack, or champion the lack of personal responsibility are liberals or leftists. But it is the liberal/leftists who make the absence of personal responsibility an integral component of their ideology and a growing force in American culture.

Consider the recent (August 24, 2022) proclamation by President Joe Biden announcing the Education Department would forgive $10,000 to $20,000 in federal student loans based on income. By early November 2022, close to 26 million Americans had applied for student debt forgiveness. (This loan forgiveness does nothing to reform the loan programs that brought us to this point.)

The loans do not simply vanish. The American taxpayers will pay the bill. It’s difficult to imagine a program so thoroughly undermining personal responsibility. Think about it—all these loan recipients went to college, most probably graduated. One would assume they read the loan documents and were fully aware of their legal, and ethical, responsibility. No one held a gun to their heads making them sign the loan documents. And what does the federal government tell them? “It’s okay. You don’t have to repay a loan you signed for and promised to pay back.”

Thankfully, President Biden’s edict was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in Texas on November 10 and is being challenged in other federal districts.

How about a peek at the deleterious effects of the welfare system?

In 1964, President Lyndon B Johnson announced a “war on poverty.” It took a couple of years for the legislation to pass, and the programs implemented. According to the US Census Bureau, the poverty rate (the proportion of all persons living in households whose total incomes were judged insufficient to meet minimum US living standards) was 15 percent in 1966. In 2020, after more than 50 years and spending approximately 25 trillion dollars fighting poverty, the official poverty rate was 11.4 percent. Wow, a drop of less than four percent in more than 50 years.

The war on poverty/welfare programs encourages irresponsible behavior and dependence on government handouts. If a welfare recipient works, they typically lose benefits. The welfare system makes it economically irrational for most low income couples to marry. Couples could have children but would lose benefits if they married. And many other stupid rules. Lack of personal responsibility breeds self-pity and despair.

The situation today—in an average month approximately 19 percent (around 59 million) of Americans receive federal government handouts of cash and valuable benefits (approximately 40 million receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs assistance, commonly called food stamps). Although it can differ a point or two over time, the federal welfare system is financed by the 55% of citizens who pay income taxes.

Some percentage of those receiving federal handouts are in a bad situation through no fault of their own and helping them is not necessarily reinforcing irresponsible behavior. Unfortunately, our nanny state system—fully supported by liberals and leftists—enables tens of millions of Americans (and who knows exactly how many illegal aliens) to abrogate personal responsibility for their own welfare.

As the great economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell notes,

“The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.”

A popular misconception is that the environment, not personal choice, is the root cause of dysfunctional communities in big cities. If the environment, including the family and larger social milieu, determined who was or was not a miscreant then virtually everyone in some areas of large cities would be one. That is not the case. The larger environment, including family dynamics, has a role, but ultimately personal decision-making is the key factor.

Two people can have the same parents, live in the same house in the same community, be raised with the same morals . . . and one will be a career criminal and the other an upstanding member of the community. How can this happen if the environment determines one’s future? It can’t. What puts decent people apart from the miscreants is not the environment, it is their acknowledging personal responsibility and that their choices determine much of their life.

The sad reality is that decades into the welfare/nanny state, virtually nothing has changed. According to political scientist and authority on public administration James Wilson:

…there are three simple behavioral rules for avoiding poverty: finish high school, produce no children before marrying, and no child before age 20. Only 8 percent of families who conform to all three rules are poor; 79 percent of those who do not conform are poor.

A modified version of Wilson’s success norms has been replicated several times with current data since the early 1970s—all found similar results. The modified version:

Graduate from high school, belong to a family with at least one full time worker, and have children while married and after age 21.

In 2015 (revised in 2018) Isabel Sawhill and Edward Rodrigue at the Brookings Institute concluded “… we find that the likelihood of being poor when following the three rules is extremely low.”

All three rules are dependent upon personal responsibility. Act responsibly and your chances of living in poverty plummet. Individual responsibility, not society, is the key.

According to Thomas Sowell,

“If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don’t congratulate yourself on your compassion.”

Another popular and obvious example of dismissing personal responsibility is the fairly recent idea of classifying alcoholism as a disease. Come on. If you believe that, then it is the only disease ever eradicated by willpower. Quitting may be a difficult process, but an alcoholic can end his “disease” by simply choosing not to drink.

If this were not the case, how else could we explain the millions of former alcoholics who simply elect not to drink and don’t? Does their “disease” simply go away? In a sense yes it does once they decide to display some willpower and character.

It may be true that some folks have a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism. But that just means that once they know this, they should not drink. Abstaining may not be easy and requires willpower, but that certainly does not mean alcoholism is a disease.

Given all the above, and much more I do not have space to mention, why would anyone want people to get a pass for bad behavior? Encouraging individuals to spend time and energy finding and complaining about external forces that determine their life, instead of buckling down and improving themselves. The very recipe for a dysfunctional society.

The Left and liberals do seem to strongly latch on to any excuse for why an individual’s crappy behavior is not their fault. The mantra is that society is to blame. Why is it so difficult for leftists/liberals to simply say that someone does not have much character and/or willpower and this leads them to unproductive thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The answer is obvious—once the way is open to honestly discuss a particular personal failing as a reason for destructive behavior, then other personal failings may also be attributed to an individual’s own actions and not the fault of society. The whole underpinning of the Left and liberalism would be badly shaken. Leftism/liberalism relies on the proposition that, for the most part, people do not control their own lives and they need the government (for liberals) or the new socialist society (for leftists) to protect and watch out for them—the nanny state.

I’m not saying everyone taking responsibility for their life is going to be a star. There are other factors such as intelligence, ambition, energy, and persistence. However, just about everyone who takes responsibility can lead a decent and fulfilling life.

“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.” Booker T. Washington.

References

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Turner, Corey. “A Federal Judge Calls Student Loan Relief Unlawful, Deepening Limbo for Borrowers.” National Public Radio website. November 11, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/10/1135940851/student-debt-relief-biden-blocked-texas-district-court

Tuwiner, Jordan. “51 Welfare Statistics by Race & Year (Chart).” Buy Bitcon Worldwide website. October 1, 2022. https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/welfare-statistics/

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