A certain degree of personal accountability seems beneficial for most people in many ways. Sure, most people may know someone who always likes to view themselves as a victim, but most people also desperately don't want to be that person. Pity is only bearable in small quantities and only temporarily for most of us. In some sense self-blame can make it easier to maintain a favourable image of yourself. It's useful in other ways too - identifying something as your own mistake may help you avoid a repetition and prevent undesired outcomes in the future. And even when you don't get a second chance, hardship can seem easier to bear when you own it as your own choice, because that might allow you to find meaning in your suffering. Self-blame is the price you pay for having a sense of control in your life and one that many people find worth paying.
Personal agency may be fact or fiction, but if it's fiction, it's a mostly useful one at least.
Until it isn't.
Sometimes we're not in control/our control is very limited and the price of denial might be higher than the comfort of illusion. Over-emphasis on personal agency can make people waste too much time and energy on games that were rigged against them from the start, stay too long in bad relationships (well, he hit me, but _I_did provoke him), and turn aggression inward that might be more productively channelled into collective action to change toxic systems - it's sometimes just plain insufficient to tackle problems that can't be solved on an individual basis (eg. climate change, a pandemic).
Even that most pragmatic benefit of personal accountability - the possibility to learn from mistakes - might on occasion backfire, because it's so easy to over-generalize. Example: You place your trust in someone, who betrays you. You look for your part in the affair and find that you have trusted too quickly, gave in to wishful thinking, overlooked several warning signs. You learn to be more guarded, identify red flags faster, trust your gut more about bad vibes, make better choices about the people you associate with. So far so good. Your social life will probably improve as you focus your efforts on people more worthy of them.
But there's no guarantee that you will never be betrayed again. Shit happens. People aren't perfectly predictable. Intimacy always involves taking a certain risk, and sometimes it doesn't pay off. So if you do get betrayed again, and you conclude that you need to be even more guarded, write off people even more quickly at the slightest hint of inconsistency, you'll eventually end up overdoing it and that will cost you just as dearly as never developing any sort of judgment at all. Getting betrayed doesn't always mean that trust was a mistake, and trying to eliminate all risk of it is just as foolish as not accounting for the possibility at all.
Certain things in life can't be accomplished without trust - mutual trust (because people can often tell when you don't trus them, and won't trust you either) maintain your own ability to trust, it is sometimes better to blame the betrayer than yourself.
“the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control”
“Individuals with a strong internal locus of control believe events in their life derive primarily from their own actions: for example, when receiving exam results, people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves and their abilities. People with a strong external locus of control tend to praise or blame external factors such as the teacher or the exam.”
I think I’m in the middle on both lol. Anybody think they have a stronger internal locus of control or a stronger external one?
Life is about building character. Don't let anything or anyone divest you of your character by you adapting your reaction to the external circumstances. Your perception is your power. Retain your power at all costs
It’s always worth remembering that the person responsible for probably 95 percent of what you do is you.
By: Wilfred Reilly
Published: Jan 1, 2025
It’s always worth remembering that the person responsible for probably 95 percent of what you do is you.
Now that we Westerners know we mostly do have free will, no one seems to like using it. A few days before New Year’s Eve, writing for a — nay, the — conservative magazine, this strikes me as a point worth discussing.
We saw what I’ll call agency-rejectionism first — in very recent discourse — from the feminists. A few weeks back, British pornographic actress Lily Phillips opted to have sex with 101 men in a “gang-bang” scene which she orchestrated and choreographed. The almost universal reaction from women’s advocates was that the fit but slender, blonde Phillips was being abused.
Self-described lesbian radical feminist Julie Bindel penned a raging column for the U.K. Guardian, bold-headlined “Shame on the Men Exploiting Lily Phillips.” Tens of thousands of angry women supported this take across social and digital media, with one typical take being Polly Clark’s: “Lots of men congratulating other men . . . in the face of televised abuse of a woman. Evil is always legalistic and careful with its terms. The Lily Phillips case is not about ‘sex.’ This isn’t about sex. It’s bestial abuse of another human being.” A full list of these responses, including Bindel (again), calling for prison for “any man involved in the torture of this woman,” and the more gender-neutral Hot & Freddy demanding “death penalty for all the dudes,” can be found here.
Unfortunately for Phillips’s unrequested “defenders,” however, there exists basically no evidence of (actual, legal) abuse in her case. Phillips is a 23-year-old adult from a fairly wealthy family, who cleared five British GCSE (“G-level”) exams and went on to college. She has never been sexually abused and describes herself — in one of the articles just linked — as not being a victim of any kind. Her financial manager is her own, feminist, mother. The young woman currently runs a for-profit OnlyFans business, managed by an all-female staff of eight, has made more than $2,500,000 (£2,000,000) to date, and stands to make hundreds of thousands more from her most recent stunt.
As it happens, she not only choreographed that event but booked the setting for it — a nice little Airbnb, now very worried about cleaning and fumigation costs — invited all of the male participants, and contracted with the professional film crew. She now, apparently, plans on a larger-scale repeat. The actress’s new goal is to break the “world sex record” by engaging with 1,000 men in a day (the current mark is 919). Those interested in a casting call may apply here. Perhaps women simply have personal agency, just as men do.
Moving on, a similar wailing cry of, “How could society fail (X amoral person)?” was heard an ocean away at about the same time, when U.S. Marine veteran Daniel Penny was acquitted on the charge of the choking death of vagrant Jordan Neely during a subway fight. A simple Google search for “We all failed Jordan Neely” turns up hundreds of thousands of hits, including predictable drivel from the New Yorker (“The System That Failed Jordan Neely”), USA Today’s main opinion editorial (“Daniel Penny’s Acquittal Isn’t Cause for Celebration”), the Washington Post (“Penny Verdict Reveals How New York City Failed Jordan Neely”), and a major piece from the National Coalition for the Homeless (“Justice Denied: Honoring Jordan Neely and Demanding Change”).
A consistent theme throughout this national coverage is that “America” failed to provide Neely with housing or clean clothing or medical treatment — and that Penny went too hard on him in that train car, perhaps for this reason. But is this empirically true? Not really.
As it happens, Jordan Neely had pretty high-quality housing available to him at the time of his death. He simply opted not to live in it. As the New York-focused website Vital City points out, “in lieu of prison” in a recently decided criminal matter, “Neely was offered 15 months of (free) supportive housing and intensive outpatient psychiatric treatment.” However, he “absconded” from his bungalow after less than two weeks. He was given psychiatric medications while in treatment, but also opted to stop taking these pills: obviously, by default while still under their influence and aware that he could not safely do so.
Not only was Neely’s overall situation largely his fault, so was the very specific situation that led to his death. What is often misleadingly described as Neely “using colorful language” with other passengers on his train car, or “asking them for food and water,” was actually — per my best-possible compilation from several articles and police reports — the phrase: “I’ll hurt everyone here! I will KILL you! I don’t care if I go back to prison!” This obviously insane behavior prompted not merely Daniel Penny but several other random male citizens to confront and restrain Neely.
One glance at Neely’s arrest record would only have strengthened the unsurprising, absolutely correct conclusion that Daniel Penny and his fellow subway heroes drew from their opponent’s crazed ranting and filthy appearance. As it happens, Neely had been locked up some 42 previous times, for crimes including an unprovoked subway attack on a 67-year-old woman (which shattered her orbital bone), breaking the nose of a different subway rider, “pulling down his pants and exposing himself” to an unsuspecting young woman on a train, and attempting to snatch a pre-teen girl away from her guardians . . . in a train station. Neely’s encounter with Penny was only the latest — and, as it turned out, the last — time he fought with strangers on the NYC public rails.
On X and Facebook, we are currently seeing a broader example of the same trend of personal responsibility denial — and one which may hit closer to home for tax-paying readers of this article. Monorail salesman, likely genius, and of-late GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy just began a major conversation and attracted an apple-throwing mob by — while defending most recipients of H-1B foreign “talent” visas — pointing out that white and black American youth may not be the hardest working imaginable occupants of the classroom.
Quoth he: “The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.”
Ramaswamy was greeted with, alongside some support, an immediate wave of anger and excuses. Elijah Schafer of The Blaze argued: “Vivek — white people built marvelous nations and were almost completely white until 1965. We didn’t have H1B visas replacing jobs and were fine. (H1B support) is only about cheap labor!” Other debaters agreed, with some suggesting that the U.S. should immediately end upper-end foreign migration totally. Our kids? Best in the world!
An honorable and tempting idea. However, as I once noted at book length, a ton of objective statistics indicate that Ramaswamy is largely correct. The average American SAT score was 1024 in the most recent year on record. It’s well below that for Latinos, and below 950 for blacks. Despite this, as writer Adam Grant noted in a sourced response to Ramaswamy, one-third of native-born American college students expect a “B” grade for showing up in class. In contrast, Asian-American students, many foreign born, study roughly three times as much as black kids and twice as much as white kids — and post a 1250 on the annual aptitude test. They tend not to expect a B+ for — forgive me — “being” present.
Delano Squires, a black conservative writer whom I personally know and like, pointed out during the whole Vivek-induced controversy that no one objects to the invocation of personal responsibility or responsibility culture when this is made in the direction of failures or poor people, or even working-class blacks as a whole, or Appalachians. However, we all tend to get a bit testy when similar reminders are made to us or our beautiful children.
Let’s make them to everyone. I intentionally opened this essay with extreme cases, but, as New Year’s Day approaches, it’s always worth remembering that the person responsible for probably 95 percent of what you do is you. Let us all work on ourselves, each other, and the country.
[ Via: https://archive.today/YE3uZ ]
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This is part of the larger victimhood industry. We have to stop rewarding self-professed "victims" - while not ignoring actual victims - who just refuse to take responsibility for their own actions and choices and feel compelled to blame others.
