Anyone who has ever found themselves in the position of assuming their responsibility exhibits one out of the two possible attitudes: either the position of responsibility gives one a false sense of importance and relevance or one dreads said responsibility, hating every consequence and activity pertaining to it.
Alas for those who are adepts of the latter manner of behaviour, society is built around the principle that each and every individual is directly responsible of his or her own life and that he or she must follow the rules that society has instituted into effect to the letter lest he or she may face at most the rigours of the law and at least the opprobrium of his fellow citizens. This is taken even further due to the fact that almost every activity which defines our everyday life encloses in itself the natural assumption of assuming responsibility.
So far, there is no clear indication as to why I would even bother to speak of such a subject. Perhaps ill-inspiration or ill-advice have made me write just for the sake of writing, forfeiting the ideas upon which this blog was built, namely knowledge, virtue and critical thinking. Why even bother to write at all? There are two main reasons which lay the foundation pertaining to this essay, and I shall present these as questions: If taking on responsibilities appears to be one of the main functions we need to accomplish as humans living in a society ordered to our liking, why is most of the population on this planet wasting precious energy every day in order to run away from them? And further, by the law of Occam's Razor(Ockham for the connoiseur who knows who the 13th Century personality was), would it not be readily apparent that the system is fundamentally wrong and it places an unnecessary burden on a being destined most evidently for someone else?
First off, allow me to call hypocrisy on those "select" individuals whom, upon reading the previous paragraph automatically, out of low self-esteem and self-insufficiency, categorized it as a sophism, as an "argumentum ad populum". I did not hold my readers' collective intelligence in contempt, I did not assume that the principle of the razor is readily apparent due to the hefty population marching in a certain direction, that of responsibility waiver. On the contrary, I was merely asking the esteemed reader whether it would not be of a more common-sense logic to assume that in the innermost sanctum of the human spirit, responsibility is of no real value and thus society was born on poor judgment and the wrong kind of principles?
And assuming that were the truth, I still do not insinuate that all is lost. Quite the contrary. As Hegel put it, if we were to view for instance the history of philosophy as a series of systems of thought which one after the other suffered the same fate we would actually be witnessing the eternal futile quest of man for the truth and a very sad story of how nothing that man will ever think, especially details and questions pertaining to himself, will ever be good enough, nor will this train of thought ever come to a definitive stop at a station where the absolute answer is to be found. Rather, the systems flow into one another, being quite similar to the flowing metamorphosis of the ideas that Hegel envisioned, and form one giant collection, named by the great Carl Jung the collective subconscious.
But if we indeed need to assume responsibility, and if this is such an integrative part of human existence that society cannot exist without it, why do we not resort to the one tool which can help us shape the world of tomorrow with as much ardour as we can muster up? Why do we not teach it specifically in schools? It is never taught, except for extremely meagre, failed attempts at making pupils, especially in the limited domain of middle education, take responsibility for unimportant matters for extremely short periods of time. You might never use advanced mathematics in your entire life, but you need to use the faculties of decision-making and you need to assume your responsibility every day.
If I am to believe in Schopenhauer, then I am to think that people are led through life by various instances of the same power, the will. Whether the will to live, or, to move on more recently to Nietzsche, the will/lust for power, it is a very egoistical undertaking which has nothing to do with the ability to assume one's responsibility. In fact, were one to be egocentric, the rules of society, aside from their coercive means of enforcement, would mean nothing so long as one's expected ends are not as they should be. If we were to marshal along Schopenhauer's ideas, we would also come across the idea that art, in itself, puts a stop to any and all yearnings, or wills, and offers the person a moment of beatitude, devoid of needing and coveting. This is for instance, in this critic's opinion, the Oxford accent in Her Majesty's English. Or, sometimes, just an ambiguous, unidentifiable text, which forces the reader to think until the last neuron in the neocortex gives up and retires, drifting off into a refractary state.
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