We Can Never Do Only One Thing:
On Self-Responsibility and Consequences
- By Diane Swiatek
These two concepts occupy the forefront of our attention every single day. These words are used so often, both within our school walls and in our culture at large, that they may provoke a blase and dismissive response from us when we hear them. I wonder sometimes if they remind us of behaviour we are not proud of, and if they provoke a bit of guilt in us that, at times, we do not pay attention to these ideas within our daily lives. They can be uncomfortable words. But what do they really mean? How can we come to see these concepts as liberating and positive?
Responsibility at the core means the ability to respond. Often, this word implies a sense of duty, but really, it means that we are able to respond appropriately to occurrences in our environment. For example, an adult who comes upon a child bleeding on the sidewalk would normally respond helpfully. Some altruism may be involved in responding to crises and to the needs of others, so that such acts become associated with unselfishness. It is no easy matter to consistently produce altruistic choices. For some of us, our own needs are so great and so unfulfilled that they take precedence in our lives, and altruism becomes an unwelcome distraction. Nevertheless, most healthy adults know that we must be active participants in our own lives within our own families and cultures, and this means that we will want to respond to our life circumstances.
To then add to the word by affixing - self to it, in self-responsibility, we acknowledge at least two things: the fact that our actions proceed from within our selves, and the fact that what our selves have done, we must acknowledge as having done. This seems so obvious, and yet many of us struggle against this acknowledgement at times. Certainly, we do not deny having done something when that something brings us accolades, when we are happy and satisfied to have participated in such actions. However, we tend to deny our involvement in our own actions when we are disappointed in ourselves, when we recognize the errors inherent in them, and especially when others will criticize us or judge us badly for those actions. For young children faced with this situation, denying their own actions is accompanied by a transparent wish to avoid punishment and disapproval. I don't blame them! I can fully understand this need to retain social acceptance. I remember a picture of a young child whose face is covered with chocolate, with the quotation, - I haven't eaten any cookies! One desperate and hopeful idea behind not acknowledging our involvement is that if the behaviour is denied, it didn't exist. This is a futile hope, however, because we cannot lie to ourselves. The alternative desperate idea is that if others do not believe, or are not aware of, our involvement, then it doesn't matter if we participated, because only others' beliefs about us matter, not the reality. However, to value only others' judgments of ourselves means that we must abdicate our own ability to choose the principles by which we will lead our lives, and leads to a very primitive form of moral reasoning. It is far better for us to evaluate the reasons for our decisions and their potential effects upon ourselves and others. Above all, we need to acknowledge the reality of our experience. Pretending does not belong in an honest life.
Now, I do understand our human difficulty in perceiving accurately the realities of life, particularly because we tend to see what we believe. Nevertheless, this adage may be more helpful for understanding who we are, than for understanding what we do. Although our beliefs, attitudes and experience certainly do alter our perceptions of reality, color our expectations for our lives, and consequently impact upon our behavior, there are nonetheless certain realities that are impossible to deny. Our concrete actions fall within this category, since denying our actions cannot undo them. What happens, happens. Whether or not other people are aware of our involvement in an event, and whether or not we forecast or wish for certain outcomes of that event, because we live in a physical world of cause and effect, certain results will occur. Moreover, even if certain consequences of our actions are foreseen, the full scope of the consequences is, to a large extent, out of our control. We can never do only one thing. The results of our actions extend far, far into the future. We can see this effect easily when we are looking back at past events, and can determine the threads uniting them in a sequence. It is more difficult to imagine future threads, because the possibilities at any given moment are endless.
This awareness makes decision making difficult. When confusion, temptation, emotion, desires, ambition and other elements lead us to a crisis point, we find ourselves having to decide what to do to resolve the problematic situation. But there are so many possibilities, and the variables are so unpredictable. We feel stuck. But we do not remain stuck. Always, we decide something. Even choosing to do nothing is doing something. We must make decisions; it is part of being human. We have the ability to predict consequences, merely by having a fully functioning frontal lobe. Once we can do that, we are no longer the slaves of instinctual responses. This is the source of free will, that faculty to respond to our environment through choosing actions. Seen in this way, making decisions may be difficult, all right, but doing so is crucial for our survival as a species on this planet. We cannot escape our self-responsibility, nor can we escape the consequences of our actions. Amazingly, though, not being able to escape does not mean that we are imprisoned. On the contrary, it means that we are free!
Having free will means that we can decide for ourselves what activities and relationships we will engage in, what we will accomplish, and how we will create our own image. Although the results of our actions spiral off in myriad directions outside our own control, the source lies within us. This is a tremendous power lying within our control. When we lose the excuse of blaming others for our responses, we gain the ability to solve our own problems. This means that we do not have to wait for other people to solve our problems. This is exciting! We can solve our own! Being fully able to respond to our own needs, we thus are fully self-responsible.
Even when our actions become part of the public domain, through the uncontrollable web of communication that exists within our human groups, we can remember that we were the source of those actions. Thus, we can avoid blaming others for merely talking about us. I think that it is an undeniable human urge to digest and to understand what is happening in our environment. If we can acknowledge this inordinate curiosity within people, then we can accept, perhaps, the fact that our behaviour, as observable fact, is in the public domain, and that this is O.K. After all, although we may not be able to foresee every possible consequence of the actions we choose, we can be aware of what does happen. If public opinion, or our own assessment, becomes uncomfortably negative, we can always respond to this new information by changing our minds about the wisdom of our actions, and reverse our decisions. In this way, we are in control of what people perceive in us, since we can act autonomously to constantly and constructively revise the behaviours that define ourselves. We are truly self-creative and self-responsible, and I think that this is a cause for celebration!