We Need More Personal Responsibility

I think humanity would be better-off if people practiced pure personal responsibility regularly. We’d be better off if personal responsibility were a personal, cultural, and collective value.

Many people mistake external responsibility for personal responsibility, or they don’t even think about it. They assert external references not realizing they’re shunning personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility is the ability to respond that comes from within the person. Personal-response-ability… the ability to respond that comes from within the person.

External responsibility is the ability to respond that comes from outside the person. It’s all the laws, codes of conduct, influences and pressures that affect us from outside the person.

We rarely practice pure personal responsibility or pure external responsibility. They are two ends of a continuum. We’re usually in between, partly personal, partly external.

The Practice of Pure Personal Responsibility

I think the only time we practice pure personal responsibility is when we’re by ourselves talking to ourselves about ourselves without any reference to anything external. I want to repeat that.

Pure personal responsibility happens when we are

  • by ourselves
  • talking to ourselves
  • about ourselves
  • without any reference to things outside the self

That’s about as purely personal as responsibility can be.

I get the impression that many of people, possibly a super majority, rarely or never practice this type of personal responsibility. They mistake external responsibility for personal responsibility.

Practice not Perfect

Pure personal responsibility is an activity to practice, not to perfect. It’s an activity to learn more about oneself and to take more personal control of what one believes and fails to believe, understands and fails to understand, values and fails to value.

In this practice we invariably reference things outside the self. When we do, it becomes at least slightly external responsibility. Of course we all do that, but we can catch ourselves, realize it is external, and realize that WE impose the external reference on ourselves. It is not imposed from the outside.

In the purist sense of personal responsibility, nobody can tell others what to experience or expect. It’s personal to each person. That’s the fundamental nature of what I mean by “pure personal responsibility”.

It’s not easy, and it’s not something we can do full time. In fact, it’s virtually mandatory to practice external responsibility and interact with others. Pure personal responsibility is a personal practice that can inform and guide our external responsibilities.

I think humanity would be better-off if people regularly practiced this kind of self reflection, this kind of personal responsibility for all they believe and fail to believe, all they understand and fail to understand, all they value and fail to value.