Why is it not enough to just take responsibility?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Hello friends, this is the third popular article on the topic of "psychodynamics", let me remind you that in the last one it was about responsibility for your actions and for your life in general, and then it was suggested to think about whether it is enough to simply take responsibility for people's lives generally better. Then I said that it was not enough, and now I propose to listen to my arguments.

To begin with, let's figure out what it actually means to "take responsibility"? The everyday meaning of this process is very different from the real one, and therefore requires preliminary clarification.

Let's remember what "psychodynamics" is. In short, this is when “everyone does what he wants, and the result is what happens,” you just saw detailed examples of “what happens” in the two previous articles.

In my opinion, responsibility begins when a person realizes that his actions affect all other people, and that even the most seemingly insignificant things in our world have very serious consequences, since they are multiplied by the number of people who do these things. … Remember the example of the garbage on the beach? One plastic bottle really doesn't hurt anyone, but multiply it by thousands of tourists and you get a mountain of garbage.

The responsibility of each person begins when he clearly realizes that all his actions ALWAYS have significant consequences. Firstly, because they are summed up with similar actions of other people, and secondly, if a person himself has a significant role in society, then his actions are significant in themselves.

In addition to these two examples, a third can also be cited, related to time: a person sowed small seeds now, and a large harvest grew later. So, the outstanding physiologist Gennady Andreevich Shichko said (not literally) that alcoholism begins not with the first glass you drink, but with the first glass that the child sees in the hands of his loved ones.

And this means that one glass of yours (just one) sometimes leads to the subsequent use of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of glasses of children when they grow to the age of free use (and often even earlier). Like this: one example of you - and hundreds and thousands of repetitions of other people. Once again, so that you feel the drama of the situation: ONE of your actions or your habit somehow manifests itself in reality in a multiply multiplied form.

However, this is not all.

Inaction is also a special form of action, when a person consciously decides not to take any action. So, for example, he can condone evil, simply allowing it to happen. Now multiply inaction by the number of inactive people and you get the expression "psychodynamics" in the saying "inaction of the majority gives rise to permissiveness of the minority." But if you know about this, then is it worth complaining that someone has “stolen” or “ruined” somewhere? Many are indirectly involved in this.

A banal and crude example: you are hardly happy with the fact that pets arrange a toilet from the city sidewalk or park, the contents of which often remain on the soles of your shoes.

Your responsibility in this example is that for the most part you do not make comments to the owners of pets who do not clean up after them, and if they are stray animals, then you do not take measures to remove them from the streets. For example, don’t donate money (or food) to abandoned animal nurseries, and these nurseries simply go down "by themselves."

More precisely, as a result of your inaction. Thus, I repeat, another important element of responsibility is not only the awareness of the process of "multiplying" one's actions by the number of people who perform this action, but also the "multiplication" of one's inaction by the same number.

How can you visually imagine such a “multiplication” of your actions and inaction in order to better understand how it works? A couple of examples have already been covered in detail before, but let's include them in the general list.

- Large traffic jams are created by inconspicuous individual motorists. Each has its own little car, and in total they manage to fill tens and hundreds of square kilometers of the roadway every day, simultaneously increasing the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

- The ocean littered with plastic is the result of many years of efforts by individual consumers, each of whom as a whole does not seem to produce much garbage.

- Many people are not averse to burning garbage in their area (including plastic and other toxic waste when burning). This logic of social behavior through the mechanism of "psychodynamics" gets its material embodiment in the form of incinerators.

Imagine that one plant is multiplied by one hundred thousand one such individual "waste incinerator" in the country. This little "incinerator" smokes and spoils the lives of neighbors who breathe pungent smoke for an hour. When we multiplied such a “incinerator” by (conditionally) one hundred thousand, we got one such incinerator, which spoils the life of those who live nearby. After all, the plant must be installed not far from the settlement or right inside, but how could it be otherwise?

After all, an individual "burner" also does not go far into the field to burn everything there, right? Again, we get the multiplication of the individual error by a large number.

- A certain man decided that "his hut is on the edge." As a result, this person, and together with him the rest of the same people, receive the permissiveness of those who allow themselves actions unpleasant for all of us, hiding behind the power. Indeed, in addition to complaining about the authorities, many people are NOT trying to take actions that would help the authorities understand where they are wrong, which means that their opinion will not be taken into account. And their position like “let everyone else start doing it, then I will” - this is the direct embodiment of “psychodynamics”, as well as the position like “they still don’t listen to us”.

- Almost none of the sober people is actively fighting for sobriety, it seems to them that other people should be engaged in this: individual activists, public organizations or even the state. Unfortunately, there are few such activists and organizations, they cannot cope, the state also cannot cope, because it generally serves the interests of the majority, and the majority prefer to drink and smoke, or are simply loyal to this phenomenon.

The result is obvious: most people are not protected from the actions of drunk people and from tobacco smoke. Again, we find that the passivity of one such person leading a healthy lifestyle, multiplied by the number of such people, gives that the seemingly simple problem associated with alcohol and tobacco cannot be solved in any way, and EVERYONE suffers from it, including teetotalers.

Once again: even the most insignificant actions (and inaction), being multiplied by the number of people who perform them, become a whole element, which, through a chain of feedbacks, returns TO ALL people. Responsibility begins with a clear awareness of this simple fact.

Well, what happens to a person when he accepts responsibility? For example, he can no longer scold other people for certain actions, because he understands that he himself is partly to blame for the fact that people do them.

He will accept the circumstances as they are, humbly relate to what is happening, because he will feel his involvement in this, while maintaining a sobriety of mind, he will try to adequately determine the environmental factor and his role in it, and not panic and complain about the circumstances. But accepting circumstances does NOT mean agreeing with them.

Such a person cannot scold the authorities, their neighbors, or anyone in general. He understands that if someone is wrong, you can try to teach him, and if you fail to teach, then you need to join forces with other people and teach from a position of greater power, up to including some provisions in the state curriculum. … If a person refuses to do this, then in my opinion he does not even have the right to express dissatisfaction with the fact that “someone” teaches his children incorrectly, because he himself wants this with his inaction, his passivity.

But as I said before, just taking responsibility is not enough. And this is clearly seen even from the last example. So the person took responsibility for the fact that the educational program is not quite adequate to modern realities, and then what? He doesn't know how to fix it.

In my opinion, it is obvious that many mistakes are made due to ignorance. You can be a good and decent person, realize that your existence already brings certain problems, try to act consciously, but this is not enough. So, for example, a good and decent person may not be aware of what I wrote about in the first article on this topic: that by taking out a loan he steals money from all other people a little, strains the economy and increases inflation.

Then he needs to eliminate his ignorance in this matter and try to live without loans with interest. For example, there were responsible people who understood the problem, improved their literacy in economic matters and created a cooperative of joint savings, which allows you to buy without loans with interest. This is an example of a real manifestation of the proposed scheme: I saw a problem - I took responsibility (I realized my guilt) - I liquidated my ignorance - I solved the problem (or helped to solve it).

At the same time, such a cooperative does not print money out of thin air, but works with the money supply, which otherwise would simply lie under the mattress of people waiting for their X-hour. Let's give more examples.

A good and decent person may not be sufficiently aware of the quality of products on store shelves, for whatever reason he will sincerely and with care feed his family with junk food, and then wonder why children get sick a lot.

Taking responsibility here is not enough, you need to learn to understand how food works and why, then learn to choose it correctly, and later, if possible, in every possible way to promote the spread of healthy food in society, open your own stores, and maybe produce your own products., break into the market and make people happy.

A good and decent person who has taken responsibility for the cleanliness of his city and recreation areas, who does not litter in public places, may not suspect that when he throws out one bag of garbage every day, it is no better than just throwing garbage. into the water on the beach, the only difference is that these bags of his will lie somewhere else, where he does not see it, or they will evaporate into the atmosphere and fall into the soil after burning, which is hardly much better.

He does not know that there are concepts that can be applied to reduce the amount of garbage thrown into landfills to a kilogram per month (I’m speaking by myself) and even less, if you still try. These include, for example, the concept of the "Zero Waste" type. Nowadays, few people own it, so it is quite difficult to find products in the "correct" packaging (suitable for relatively harmless processing in Russia) or stores where they are sold without packaging at all.

Even now, for sure, many readers who first heard about "Zero Waste" think that I am talking about waste recycling and its separate collection. I often face this misconception. In fact, in this concept, recycling and separate collection are in the penultimate place on the list of actions that must be taken to produce less garbage. The first four positions are occupied by much more effective techniques.

And now, when a person eliminated his ignorance and began to throw out the same garbage bag not every day, but every six months, he can teach this to other people, start creating his own product, the consumption of which does not create waste, or even open a whole store in the corresponding direction. But until he knows that there is "zero waste", he will sincerely and honestly throw out a lot of garbage and not know about his future fate, believing that this no longer concerns him.

There are many more things that people do not know and do not even imagine. The absence of these ideas, combined with the frantic rhythm of modern life, when there is simply no time to engage in deep self-education and enlightenment, makes it impossible to improve our life just by becoming a “good responsible person”.

There is a funny observation: the word "ignorance" in English sounds like "ignorance", which, in turn, can have the context of "rejection of attention", that is, a CONSCIOUS active process! Do you feel where I am leading? Ignorance is a voluntary refusal to raise awareness. Moreover, the word "responsibility" could be written through "D": "RESPONSIBILITY", from the word "I know", that is, "I know."

Thus, simply “doing good deeds” is not enough. It would be more correct to admit that “I do not know anything about the world” and begin to eliminate my ignorance; not just “be good,” but deliberately and actively independently look for where and what you are bad at and how you can fix it.

Having mastered new knowledge, you need not to clamp it in yourself, but to carry out actions aimed at improving society using this knowledge. I learned it myself - teach another!

Thus, friends, I urge you to start making the life of our society better according to the following scheme: take responsibility for your actions and understand how what is happening in our world is indirectly related to your actions (and inaction) - to realize your ignorance of the issue that worries you - to eliminate your ignorance - to learn to do the right thing yourself - to help others learn to do the right thing. But without pressure, and without hatred, but calmly and judiciously, accepting life, other people, and yourself in this life as it is.