A Fallacy in Personal Responsibility: Part II. (A Monologue.)

"Don’t lecture me on personal responsibility; you have none of your own. You never owned up to your actions nor their meanings nor their consequences; even in this moment, you refuse to make amends to those you hurt, though they were in your charge, by your consent and your false charity.

 

You treat me as if I were totally responsible for my own happiness and sorrow, though it’s not my focus, and it seems to be a weakness only if it were my fault and only motive. Yet am I the only one responsible for my well-being? Was it I who authored my own misery? Should I pursue it, taking your example, seeking nothing else? Perhaps were I an egoist; the Devil always wants us to take pride in selfish aims but never their effect on Others. I refused to make myself the focus of my enterprise, and even at this moment I am seeking more than what is owed to me, since Others have a greater need than I do. Yet this seems unthinkable to you.


How am I then the author of this sorrow? What have I done to deserve it? You admit that were you to accommodate me, I would prosper, and you treat that like it’s something terrible. How can you have such power over my well-being, such contempt for it, and yet deny that you have been the greatest source of sorrow in my life? If I am bound to other lives by caring and compassion, then what use is defamation? They betrayed me by exposing what I wrote to them in private. Yet what angry words have not been justified by love and action?

 

Take some note, then, from a man of action, who had honoured you with opportunity for friendship: You cannot possess the power to succeed without the burden of the failure; if you have the opportunity to help me but will not, then you’re the author of my tragedy, not I. There’s nothing I can do but to acknowledge it. 

 

You cannot claim I’m merely maladjusted to the World when this is the example that you want the World to follow; it remains the World you want us to create. I am not weak, but rather generous with power, and I recognize this power since it was the one I gave you long ago. Yet I was not the one who chose to turn it to such purposes. That was entirely your doing. 

 

Nor can you insist that I did not deserve it. I have given you this power in the hopes you’d use it to my purposes, believing you agreed with them because you valued me. Now I must take it back despite myself. It was not my decision that it ought to be retracted; you’re the one who rendered it a useless husk of what it was.

 

These were your doings. I bore witness and I bore the pain for them. Were I a lesser man, then I would be the one responsible. Then I would have to be the one to bear the burden of my sorrow. Yet my actions have been pure, though not without the colour of my rightful rage. It’s not my fault I suffered. This was no ulterior agenda, but a situation you agreed to, though you made of it a thing that I did not consent to.

 

You won’t make of me the lesser man; I am not you. Perhaps I would have prospered had I followed your example, though you would have suffered for it. Now I suffer for my dignity, and that you will not take from me by the appropriation of your blame."

 
**[({R.G.)}]**
  
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