| William Blake Jr. 2006-04-10, 11:29 am |
| Scott Peck described as "neurotics" the people who take responsibility
for things that are not their responsibility - and as "character
disordered" the people who do not take responsibility for things that
are.
My response: The issue in many cases is not psychological but
ideological, and the ideological explanation is both simpler and more
precise than the psychological one.
It may come as a surprise to people who think in terms of emotional
forces, but one's conscious beliefs have a fair amount of things to do
with how one relates to the world. And these conscious beliefs differ
tremendously in what is believed to be one's own responsibility; what
is believed to be the next person's responsibility; what is believed to
be the government's responsibility; or what responsibility is shared,
to what extent and among whom.
Do you remember Beatles' song, "Don't carry the world upon your
shoulders?" The "carrying the world upon your shoulders" appears to be
a quite common - ahem - neurosis among people with particular
ideologies. Let me ask you a stupid question. Was Jude an objectivist?
A libertarian? Could he have been these things? Or was he a liberal
whose self was identified with the good of the world, who believed in
shared responsibility, and who found life meaningless for himself and
intolerable for all unless the world was in a good shape?
I ask another stupid question. What is the responsibility of any given
person, for what, and according to whom? We see people fight over this
issue all the time. We see people shunting the responsibility at
someone else; we also see people taking responsibility for one or
another issue, or cause, or project, or society, or outcome, that many
would say is not their responsibility - but that, without someone
taking responsibility for it, would never get accomplished at all. Are
the first group character-disordered? Are the second group neurotics?
Or is this something that people have been doing for as long as - well,
for as long as there was a responsibility to shunt one way or another,
which is to say for as long as there were people?
Remember the Communist "menace"? These were the people who believed
that responsibility was shared and a part of each citizen as well as
humanity as a whole. Indeed the same ideology was mouthed once by
American leaders, from FDR to Kennedy - and now, guess who - Mr.
Compassionate Conservative. Were these people possessive of character
disorders? Were they pushing on America a mass neurosis? Or did they
simply recognize that responsibility in any given society contains both
the individual and the shared aspect - something that was articulated
by Mr. Theodore Roosevelt of all people, long before these - ahem -
supposed sociopaths took these ideas to such places as "The only thing
to fear is fear itself," "Do not ask what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country" and "Mr. Putin has a good soul."
Indeed I am of the belief that each ideology arrives at its own
peculiar mix of supposed character disorder and neurosis. The people
who believe in shared responsibility will be described by people who
believe in individual responsibility as both taking responsibility for
things that aren't their fault and not taking responsibility for things
that are. The same is the case the other way around.
I ask the final question. Where does your responsibility stop and
another person's responsibility begin? What is responsibility of which
citizen or which entity or which collection of citizens or entities?
I've had people tell me that I had a responsibility to myself, and to
tell me what that responsibility was. I've had people grow exasperated
because I kept saying that I was not interested in things in which an
American citizen is supposed to be interested and in pursuit of which
he is supposed to expend his life. Let me get this straight. You tell
me what I owe myself? You tell me what I should want and what I should
strive for? And then you claim that we are living in a free country?
A person who believes in every person being completely responsible for
his life will be both a character disorder and a neurotic. He will
strive obsessively to be completely at top of everything, including
things that he can do precious nothing about; and he will do nothing to
contribute to shared good. That similar characterization will be
frequently made for people who believe in shared responsibility, needs
no elaboration. So this is my question to Mr. Peck:
Where does one person's responsibility end and another's begin?
Where does one entity's responsibility end and another begin?
What responsibility belongs to individual, to country, or to one or
another entity?
And what does a healthy character do to determine which delineation and
which ideology is legitimate?
There are two directions of interest in any human being. One is
self-interest; the other is other-interest. The I-Thou duality
manifests in concern for self and concern for the next person or for
the world. The two components can be arranged in many different ways. I
am here to show the best way to arrange them.
Ilya Shambat.
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