Back to Gaffer's Philosophy
Archives.
The Gaffer's Philosophy;
Part 13: Transfer of Responsibility:
June 10, 2002:
In this essay, I want to get into this idea of personal responsibility.
In my eleventh essay on philosophy, I suggested that we are all
responsible for knowing the laws upon which our country is founded.
I also said that we have many more responsibilities which we usually
neglect. Until now I have looked at our democracy and discussed
some of our founding principles. Much of this had to do with our
rights as citizens of a free democracy. I have not said much about
responsibility.
Now I think it is time to look at the issues of responsibility. Before I can do that, I must address one of the most pervasive dishonesties of our time. That is the transference of personal responsibility to government. This is one of the things which came out of the new deal politics following our great depression. At that time our government began doing things for people which the people had been doing for themselves. In time, that philosophy of Big-Daddy government evolved into the cradle to grave system we have now. No one is expected to do anything for themselves. Big-Daddy does it all.
It is difficult to fault the spirit of caring which spawned the new deal politics. There are few people today who can even imagine the depth of despair which gripped the American people then. I was born in 1930 at the height of that painful period. What I remember most in my youngest years is how sad and somber my father looked. He was not the only one. Most of the men I knew looked the same.
Despair can be a paralyzing burden for any human. I think it was also paralyzing for our entire cultural psyche. It produced a kind of inertia. To overcome that the new government undertook some pump priming and some welfare efforts. I have no wish to fault that effort. It was responsible, at least in part, for our recovery. However, I believe it has evolved into something totally unintended and untenable. Besides the morality of it, the financial cost of this transference of responsibility has become unbearable.
It is not going to help us very much to wonder what came first. The effort following the depression was well intended. Then it grew. Did the people demand that government do more? Did the government just decide to do more for political reasons? It does not matter. Here we are. The patten is clear. Politicians encourage selfishness, then pander to it for votes. What we have now, is a system which discourages and even punishes responsible personal behavior. Our system of welfare is the classic example.
Regardless of the evolution of it, our current situation is a result of the selfishness, dishonesty, and laziness of the citizens. It is the private citizen who has failed, no one else. The citizen is the source of our government. No government can exist without the support of the citizens. Whether it be active support or tacit support by default, is irrelevant. All governments are, in final analysis, of and by the people. Politicians, even despots, are powerless without our tacit support.
I think it is time for us to admit our culpability as citizens and begin the recovery. This means moving back toward the philosophies of personal integrity and responsibility of our founders. This means making some sacrifice. It means giving up some of the plums of government largess. It is not about expediency. It is about doing what is right no matter what.
As a model, I would like to hold up our earliest citizens. I speak of those people who settled America and built this country with courage and work. Those are the people we often call peasants. Often we tend to have contempt for them. These are the settlers and workers who came to America and formed the backbone of our productive capacity. They were in fact the backbone of America in the early days when this nation was being founded. Those people had a personal ethic of personal responsibility. It is that ethic which built and made this country strong. It is that which we have lost.
That personal ethic of our earliest citizens came out of a spiritual grounding. In turn, it is the lack of a spiritual grounding which allows us to be personally irresponsible. The people who built this nation had a very strong personal spiritual grounding. We may disagree with it, but it sustained them. We have nothing comparable to sustain us in our moments of despair and temptation. We have discarded it because as a scientific people we found it wanting. We disagreed with it. Along with it, we have discarded the concepts of personal spirituality and personal ethics altogether.
I submit that it is insane to discard the concept of personal spirituality on the grounds of a disagreement with a particular belief system. The human being is a spiritual being. To deny that is a suicidal negation of our very nature. As a result of that denial, as a people, we are insane. We have discarded our spiritual grounding and that has driven us insane. We have cast ourselves adrift.
Culturally, we are insane. Step back and look at us from the outside. We can see it everywhere if we look if we care to. The events in Littleton did not occur in a vacuum. They were preceded by a breach of implicit commitments; a forfeiture of adult responsibility. We currently have a shocking number of child sociopaths cum-psychopaths who are the sacrifices to the gods of selfish upward mobility. The kids who committed those murders were not born insane. They became insane.
The marked increase in fraud and theft are not isolated coincidence. The Enron debacle is just one conspicuous example. Dishonesty in business and leadership, public and private, is so common that we have come to expect it. We have more sociopaths and psychopaths in our leadership now that the Roman Empire had during it's collapse.
It is time to look at these things honestly and admit our participation. This is about personal integrity. We must, each of us, take responsibility, in our personal behavior. We must do that in the marketplace and in the voting booth. We must refuse to be irresponsible and refuse to accept it from others. We must refute this pandering to our greed and selfishness.
In voting, we should never vote for anything except the long term best interest of America. We should never ever vote for our pocketbook at the expense of our country. It is that kind of miserable shabby selfishness which got us to this chaotic state of greed driven, Washington based politics.
When we look at a candidate for office, there is only one question we must ask. Is this person good for the community, the state, and the country? If the answer is no, we cannot vote for that person regardless of our personal interests. If we cannot hold to that principle of integrity, we are doomed. The power mongers will win and we will lose.
To be sure, no candidate I know of can satisfy that question now. The answer to all who are currently running is NO! Hence, we must end up voting for the one who is the least dreadful. We must choose the one who will do the least damage to the long term interests of America. This is likely to be the one who makes the least in the way of promises.
The ideal candidate would promise me nothing except her personal integrity as issues unfold. And, she would demand my personal integrity. She would demand that I get off of my duff and start doing what I'm supposed to do. She would suggest that I begin to act with honesty and courage. She would insist that I stop whining and freeloading. She would insist that I find a way to contribute.
Now, in the following weeks, I will take up the various areas
of personal responsibility which I feel are important. This will
include our responsible to ourselves, our family and friends,
our local community, our country, and the world. I also intend
to discuss our personal ethics and the spiritual groundings which
underpin them. I will also get to a discussion of the responsibilities
of the organized religious community.
Back to Gaffer's Philosophy
Archives.
|
|
|
|