The blame game

This episode discusses how we cannot absolve ourselves of responsibility and how responsibility is a choice both for us as individuals as well as society. Blame is in fact an admission of error on our own behalf.

Transcript

Who’s responsible and who can I blame?

Good morning,

We like to blame others, but how much of that blame is our responsibility?

We like people to be responsible, we like to feel that we can take responsibility and yet so often we seem to find a lack of responsibility everywhere we look. What is this mysterious thing we call responsibility, why is it such an important idea and do we really understand what responsibility is?

Welcome back to another episode of IAMSHOKUNIN. Today I want to talk about probably one of the most powerful ideas we have as humans and something of a foundation block in our personal lives and society at large.

Responsibility might be defined as:

“the state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something within one's power, control, or management.”

On the face of it this seems like a perfectly reasonable definition and statement, but there is an aspect to this that bothers me and it is I think one of the reasons that as a western society we have ended up with a large legal system and propensity to sue people. You see within this definition we have created what I would terms a “get out clause” and that’s the bit where we say ‘within one’s power, control or management.”

You see with responsibility you actually have two elements - the first element is that of choice, the choice of whether you choose to take responsibility for something, this I think is what most of us would normally understand as responsibility. It’s when we either say to those around us, “i am taking responsibility for this” and everyone heaves a sigh of relief because someone has decided to take the potential burden of responsibility off them, and herein lies the second element, the responsibility for not making that choice.

You see, I don’t actually think it is possible to avoid responsibility by not choosing to take responsibility. You have in fact made a choice either way and as a result you are responsible for whatever outcome arises.

Now I know this is not what you want to hear and I apologise if this upsets your sensibilities somewhat, but acceptance or rather non acceptance of this fact is at the heart of almost all of our problems in the word today.

Let me take a simple example so that we might better explore this idea.

Let us take our health as an example of personal responsibility. We are bombarded on a daily basis through the media in its various forms and advertising to take responsibility for our health. We are encouraged to take exercise, eat healthily, manage our work life balance, have healthy habits, reduce our alcohol intake, quit smoking and so on. But how many of us actually do all of this. How many of us take personal responsibility for doing all of those things? Let’s look at what we are being asked to do to have a long and healthy life and let’s see how many of those items we actually do.

• We are encouraged to take at least 10 minutes of strenuous exercise per day
• We are told not to smoke
• We are encouraged to drink only a moderate amount of alcohol and not binge drink
• We are told to avoid highly processed food high is sugar, salt and fat
• We are told to eat between 9 and 12 portions of vegetables a day
• We are warned not to eat cured meats and to limit red meat consumption and more recently advised not to eat animal protein at all
• We are encouraged to limit our consumption of refined oils
• Our doctors are keen that we remain at the correct weight for our hight

Now there are two sides to this coin as some of you will already have concluded - it is both possible for you to accept personal responsibility for this advice and follow all of the guidelines or not. Either way it is a choice. In the end , your level of responsibility comes down to how you are feeling about yourself when you are sitting in the operating theatre waiting for open heart by pass surgery, do you feel okay with the choices you made or not. Note, those last words “the choices you made or not”. 

There are two aspects to this, firstly we believe responsibility is a choice and secondly we always seem to refer to choices and responsibility in the past tense because contextually the realities of that perceived choice always manifest themselves in the future, so we are only really able to contextualise and understand whether we made the right choice after we make a choice to take responsibility.

This I am afraid is a falsehood, this is us doing our best to absolve ourselves of personal blame. In reality responsibility doesn’t actually work that way. That bit in the definition “something within one's power, control, or management.” - it’s a lie. You see, by making a choice with regard to responsibility either to take it or not take it, you are committing to an outcome. What your brain is trying to do when it tells you not to take responsibility is trying to give you an excuse for the possible negative outcome that could be the result of not taking responsibility.

This is where it gets interesting. If I offered you a million Euro’s, that’s a lot of money to be responsible for, but most, if not everyone would not hesitate to take responsibility for that gift. We are happy taking responsibility for things that are good, and easy, those are things where we don’t even think twice. We tend to get a little more reticent when we see hard work and the potential for hardship or failure on the horizon. In those situations we would generally prefer someone else to take that responsibility. What we are actually saying in this situation is “at least if it goes wrong no one can blame me, or at least I can blame someone else”. But this also is a falsehood foisted upon us by our unruly brain, because if your life depended on giving someone else responsibility you are in effect giving someone else total control over your mortality - that seems to be an enormous thing to give up.

And yet that is exactly what we all do on a daily basis. What we do is exchange responsibility for blame and acceptance of blame for rectification. We seek damages from outcomes that have harmed us from the actions of others. Look at our list of healthy lifestyle options, we are more than happy to blame the food industry for feeding us unhealthy food - note again this curious terms of “feeding us unhealthy food” as if by some bizarre turn of nature we have given over responsibility to a commercial enterprise to feed us - the food industry is NOT feeding us, the food industry is simply making food that we can either buy or not buy, choose or not choose depending on the level of responsibility we choose to take for our health. The fact that we eat this unhealthy food is actually because despite the fact that we think that by not taking responsibility for our health we have somehow got out of that personal responsibility, we have in fact by default taken responsibility for not taking responsibility.

And there we have it, in a nut shell. What I am saying is that you cannot avoid taking responsibility because responsibility hinges on a choice and not making a choice is actually a choice. This in effect means that you cannot blame anyone for anything, blame in this example doesn't actually amount to anything other that a feeble attempt to make ourselves feel better about an outcome not of our choosing.

Take for example the poor soul sitting in the operating theatre waiting for their triple heart bypass. They will be thinking to themselves about all the times they chose to not to eat the healthy option or decided that perhaps exercise was overrated and how a good glass of red wine and a fine 18 ounce medium cocked sirloin was actually healthy. I mean how can a  person be expected to go out to work every day without a few rashers of bacon and a few eggs inside themselves.

It’s harder than you think, taking responsibility, and it’s even harder to take responsibility for your actions in retrospect. We go into denial at that stage, your triple heart bypass patient starts to come up with excuses such as “I didn’t eat that much red meat, I only had a few glasses of wine a day, I read an article once telling me a glass of wine a day was good for me, how else am I expected to get enough protein, and when was I expected to get the time to exercise when I was working all the time and I have been trying to give up smoking” So now we are seeking sympathy from others as well as ourselves for our irresponsibility.

I don’t like the world irresponsibility, I don’t think it should exist. You see if you cannot escape responsibility you have in effect created a word that is judgemental in “Irresponsible”. It is somehow a word that describes our choice not to be responsible but I don’t buy that argument. You have exactly the same amount of responsibility whether you chose to do - in this case- something good for your health or something not good for your health, ultimately your dying heart only knows the consequence of the decisions you made and ultimately you made those decisions by either choosing or not choosing.

But surely there must be exceptions you say, I mean I can’t be held responsible for the actions of others for example and on the face of it I would agree with you. But if we look a little closer at this statement, we once again see that this is a form of choice, we are choosing to let ourselves off the hook for the actions of someone else that might have an effect on our own lives. We have known for the last 70 years or more that greenhouse gasses affected the climate. We have known that burning fossil fuels was detrimental to the atmosphere on earth and yet we chose to live in such a way as if those factors were nothing to do with us - they were too big, or only solvable  at a global level through governments. We in effect decided not to take responsibility for them. But could we have instead taken responsibility for those things? and the answer is yes, we could, we could have voted the green party into power in our countries political system - that is the least we could have done and required very little personal effort on our behalf - but we haven't done that. We could have bought the most fuel efficient car on the market, used public transport as a first choice of travel, curtailed out international holidays and flights. We could have chosen to do those things as a form of personal responsibility to the welfare of the global climate - but we didn’t. Not only didn’t we do those things, but we didn’t even attempt to support those that were trying to - instead we chose to ridicule them.

Faced with a bar of chocolate or and apple we almost unanimously reach for the chocolate. It is in our nature you see to satisfy ourselves and seek pleasure and comfort and I think that much of the problem we have with taking responsibility lies in this natural desire we have, this innate response. But maybe I am being too harsh, maybe we can lay some of the blame for our societies ills at the feet of others. 

Did you just hear that? that small sigh of relief at the back of your head that said “yes -at last” yes, that was the sound of you thinking you were about to be let off the hook.

I’m sorry, but even when we consider how our basic desire for a comfortable life can be manipulated by others for their own gain and against your better interests, we can’t quite shake off the mantel of responsibility. You see we enter into the manipulation willingly. For example I don’t really want to give up steak and chips or red wine or fondue - I love them, they are delicious, so as a result I only really read the articles published on the internet that tell me that new research has found that they are healthy and that refined sugar is the culprit. But then I only remember the article telling me that cacao is good for blood pressure and antioxidants so that must make chocolate good for me too, so the article telling me to avoid refined sugar can only have meant that I shouldn’t have a big dessert after my steak and chips and can’t possible refer to a healthy bar of chocolate.

I mean you needed that range rover, because you had to take the children to school everyday and it was actually the safest car to drive - never mind that it only achieved 7 miles to the gallon. You were being a responsible parent right? I mean you are really only one person, how much of an effect could you have?

And this brings us on to the subject of collective responsibility. This is the form of responsibility that we really don’t like considering, because this is the bucket where we can throw all of our unwanted personal responsibilities and offload them onto someone else. 

I remember as a child listening to a sermon in church and the local vicar talking about dropping a sweet wrapper on the ground - something we have all done at one time or another. It doesn't seem like a big deal really. But then consider that we all drop our sweet wrappers on the ground, suddenly there are six of seven billion sweet wrappers floating around in the world a day within a year there is an incalculable amount fo rubbish floating about.  That is what collective responsibility is about. How hard is it in reality to put the sweet wrapper into your pocket and then empty your pocket when you find a bin. It is in fact the easiest thing in the world to do. So why don’t we do it? Well we don’t do it because we are not taught about collective responsibility. In fact we are encouraged to think that anything that revolves around the collective or society is the responsibility of government. They have wastepaper picker uperrers or garbage services and I pay for those out of my taxes, so it’s someone elses problem not mine. As if somehow through paying a tax you have no choice around paying, you can justify to yourself that you don’t have a responsibility to dispose of your sweet wrapper in a responsible manner. You see how ludicrous this becomes when you start to focus on it.

You see, there is no way you can escape responsibility. When you are growing up and leave home, this is normally the time when you have to start taking responsibility. Up until that moment, you parents took responsibility for most of the actions you took. Occasionally you will have decided to take responsibility in the form of a small rebellion against your parents. Perhaps you decided not to take a rain coat when you were urged to take one and got cold and wet as a result - these were small examples of your desire to take control of your own life.

Growing up is actually all about taking responsibility it’s about becoming an adult. Age is not a very good indicator of adulthood.

I take a different view. I regard adult hood as a function of a persons desire to make choices regarding the level of responsibility they are prepared to take for their personal and collective actions. Ultimately you cannot escape responsibility, but people try their best for as long as they can in the mistaken belief that it makes life easier for themselves.

It doesn’t. actually the reverse is true. The longer to try to hold out against taking responsibility the larger the consequential resulting responsibility will be for you. Life has a nasty habit of not letting you off the hook. The triple heart bypass patient will have no choice but to look after their health if they want to stay alive, the population of earth will have no choice but to change their economies away from burning fossil fuels if we want to maintain an atmosphere conducive to life. There is in fact a limit to how long you can shirk your responsibilities.

In eastern ontology this is called Karma and as the Americans say “karma’s a bitch!” Karma is the systemic result of poor choices and a lack of responsibility.

So where do we go from here?

The first step i think is to accept that whether you like it or not, you are responsible for everything in your life, whether you make a choice to be responsible or not. This is the first step on the healthy path to happiness. So every time your head tells you “i think I will let so and so take responsibility for that” you have in fact taken responsibility for letting someone else influence your life. You can’t blame someone else if it all goes horribly wrong, you can only blame yourself for having not taken more responsibility. The first step is to make a conscious choice to take responsibility.

The second step is to realise that it’s easy to play victim to circumstance. Bad things happen and you might feel justified in saying that they were done to you and you wouldn’t have chosen to be subjected to those actions given the choice. These are the hidden consequences of previous choices around responsibility. You know what they say “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” You have a responsibility to yourself to minimise risk to yourself and others. That doesn’t mean you can avoid all the bad things in life - in fact you can’t, but you can learn and through that learning you can take responsibility for yourself and others that prevents or minimises bad things from happening again. 

The third step is to realise that you can’t give responsibility to others, it just doesn't work, nobody has the same level of self interest that you do. So if you give responsibility to others you are in effect increasing the likely hood of a bad outcome. If you must give responsibility to others then you have a responsibility to make sure that others look after that responsibility. That means you check up on things or in the case of collective responsibility you ensure that people are taking their responsibility seriously and feel accountable for their actions - in effect a form of activism.

Finally, responsibility of  form of liberation. That smug feeling of self satisfaction you get when you complete your first half marathon when you made a choice to get fit, is in fact the feeling of responsibility, that decision to take control over an aspect of your life that you had previously not considered. That warm feeling you get when you remember to take your shopping basket with you to the supermarket on your bike rather than relying on the plastic bags at the checkout and taking the car 500 meters down the road - that is the feeling of taking responsibility at both an individual and a collective level. It is about setting an example to others, it is about highlighting issues and challenges that we face and bringing it to other people attention, about increasing peoples perception around individual accountability. It’s about saying “it’s not all about me - your actions also affect me - grow up and take responsibility”.

You will find that the more responsibility you take on board for yourself and others the easier your life will become. It might seem like hard work at first, but responsibility is a bit like a heavy coat. It’s uncomfortable to get on at first and it feels heavy, but as you get used to it you realise that it’s heavy for a reason, - it keeps you warm, it protects you, it has useful pockets to carry things around in - you can lend the protection of it to others in need sometimes and after a while you become stronger and you don’t notice its weight.

Good luck to you all on your life journey and I wish you strength and luck as you take up your journey in a responsible manner. I and everyone around you are dependent on you to be responsible. Our lives quite literally depend on it.