Responsibility
Contents
Definition
Applications
Does Taking Responsibility Change the World?
"Yeah, and the fact that you’re fallible is no excuse for not taking responsibility. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, which is one of the things that brought the terrible Soviet Empire to a standstill, he did that: he said that he went over his whole life with a fine-toothed comb, every single thing. When he was in prison, he realized that he had done many things that put him in prison. So he was in two kinds of prisons. He was in the prison the Soviet state produced, and then he was in the prison that the Soviet state produced, that he participated in producing, that then imprisoned him—both at the same time. And so when he figured that out, he thought, "OK, what I did I do in my life to increase the probability that I would end up where I ended up?" He said he went over his life with a fine-toothed comb. His question was, "is there something I can do now to atone for what I failed to do in the past?" That was a serious question. He wasn’t playing a game. That’s why he memorized a 1,500-page book, essentially. It’s no game. The consequences of that were literally world changing. So that’s an interesting thing. So let’s say you go over your past with a fine-toothed comb, and you decide you’re going to take responsibility for everything you did that was wrong, and everything that you failed to do that you could have done that was right. Does that change the world? It depends on how thoroughly you do it. You might say it changed the world like nothing else possibly can, and I think that that's actually right. That’s also a frightening thought, because it means that things would be way better than they are, if you weren’t so damn useless." [1]
"If you can't support your own weight, then someone else has to do it, and that's not good." [2]
Lift The Largest Load You Can Handle
“Life is a battle for survival. You are going to die anyway – so lift a load, the largest load you can handle, do something good and make your life meaningful and glorious" [Citation Needed]
"You can plot and scheme your way through life, you can do what's expedient instead what's meaningful or you can say what you believe to be true and take the consequences. And that, as far as I'm concerned, that's the fundamental call to responsibility.[3]
"Responsibility takes you away from stupid suffering and shame." [4]
Interpretations
The liberation of responsibility. If the suffering really is your fault, then there's something you can do about it.
Pick something up and carry it; it must be heavy enough, but not too heavy
[Pornography] is all pleasure without responsibility and that’s deadening, parasitic.
See Also
