The Poisonous Erosion of Personal Responsibility
When Julius Caesar was repeatedly stabbed in a Senate meeting in 44 B.C., it wasn’t just Brutus, Cassius, or the other 60 “liberators” who were killing him — it was, in their minds, “the people.” While the Senators miscalculated — the “people” were furious at them for killing Caesar — their goal in acting together is one often associated with collective action: the diffusion of responsibility. When more people become involved, the less accountable each individual will feel. “Society,” the Senators wanted people to believe, was culpable in Caesar’s murder.
Meritocracy and individualism, even when pursued imperfectly, were once the core values in Western society.
The modern West has been plagued by a shared mindset that normalizes blaming society for individual failures. Instead of “liberators,” we now have “liberals” who cite systemic discrimination as the cause of marginalized groups’ struggles, while ultimately creating a culture of stagnation and helplessness. (READ MORE: The Surprising, Uplifting Truth About Inequality)
It is often the case that when a group of people are “underrepresented” — have small numbers of people from that group — in certain jobs or educational institutions, it is because few people from that group have performed at the same standard required of others. Rather than delve into how or why we see these outcomes, intellectuals have preferred to discuss “glass ceilings” or “opportunity bias” in order to explain them. This has perpetuated the belief that the system is fundamentally unfair to individuals in certain groups.
In Life at the Bottom, Theodore Dalrymple describes how intellectuals and activists have taught the underclass to blame society for their struggles. Such a pernicious mindset reflects a diffusion of responsibility, where stagnation is attributed to external forces like inequality, rather than internal ones, making individuals feel less accountable for what is often, as Dalrymple terms, socially destructive behavior.
Doing well in underclass neighborhoods has become something that often carries stigma from others within the same place. Working as an emergency room doctor, Dalrymple recounts experiences of treating young people from these neighborhoods who were beaten up for simply doing well in school. Economist Thomas Sowell, in response to these observations, compares this to the experiences of black Americans, where academic success is often dismissed as “acting white.”
Dalrymple contrasts this troubling trend with the experience of his father, who also grew up in the slums. In earlier generations, underclass neighborhoods placed a strong emphasis on education as a means of escaping poverty. Before the rise of the modern rhetoric of “understanding poverty,” there was a shared belief in the power of personal effort and learning. Today, however, a new generation of the underclass has not only been denied these tools but has also been conditioned to see their circumstances as entirely “society’s fault.” With decades of powerful civil rights law enforcement, this has occurred at a time when failure is less likely to be the result of society than it has ever before been.
The welfare state heightens a “non-judgment” rhetoric by treating the underclass as what Dalrymple calls “livestock.” Socially destructive or self-destructive behaviors have been removed from the realm of personal responsibility, shifting responsibility to “society” to chip in for the consequences for such behaviors. Hence, there should be more focus on true compassion in holding people to higher standards and treating them as personally responsible human beings, not “livestock.”(READ MORE: Misleading Statistics on Income Inequality)
Merit and Responsibility
Performance standards have increasingly been trivialized and even condemned. Thomas Sowell notes that there is a growing belief in universities which have implemented Affirmative Action policies that holding individuals to performance standards fails to account for how the playing field has been “tilted.” According to this view, the skills that foster success have systemically excluded disadvantaged minorities. This reflects how the term society has been weaponized to evade personal responsibility, functioning as a modern equivalent of “The Devil made me do it.” Similarly, success and achievement are often scrutinized after the fact and dismissed as mere “privilege,” ignoring the personal effort required to attain them.
In Asian American communities, often cited for “‘overachieving” or reaching disproportionate levels of success, discipline instilled at an early age and a strong belief in meritocracy have helped large numbers of individuals attain success. For some critics, there is an aura of mystery that surrounds the achievements of Asian Americans, especially given the lack of policies specifically designed to lift them up.
The explanation for this is actually quite simple: they outwork everyone else. Independent educational traditions within Asian American households foster the importance of work, as it was found that Asian Americans from low-income families scored higher on the SAT than white and black Americans from upper-income families.
While government policies have nearly destroyed the independent educational traditions in black Americans from low-income families — traditions now more commonly seen in Asian American and Jewish American communities — it is undeniable that individual effort plays a crucial role. Recent government policies in ghettos have made it more difficult to attain quality education like the education Thomas Sowell received in the ghetto roughly 80 years ago. However, as Sowell would put it, society cannot be blamed for this disparity, nor can it solve it.
Meritocracy and individualism, even when pursued imperfectly, were once the core values in Western society, but have been greatly undermined by the half-century of collectivist intellectuals who claim that society is to blame for individual struggles. The diffusion of responsibility arising out of this societal blame produces a culture that incentivizes and subsidizes inaction and personal irresponsibility.
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