Flashback – Freedom and Responsibility

[What results from a lack of responsibility is often deceptive. No one gets hurt, and any important job usually gets done. When an individual fails to take care of it, someone else takes up the slack by doing it for them. The so-called helicopter parents fit into this category. But what happens when this behavior occurs on a societal level? – The helicopter government steps in with programs and regulations, and we give up our freedom one step at a time. It's true both for citizens and for corporations.

I reminded everyone of this consequence back in July 2011.]

Some think the opposite of freedom is slavery or perhaps living under a dictatorship, but in our society the opposite of freedom is the benevolent authoritarianism of warnings and legal restrictions resulting from our failures in the dimension of responsibility.

We are told that we are all victims of the economy, of our high-stress jobs, and of our non-stop lifestyles. The word is used in ads everyday, one even asking me if I am the victim of hair loss. We are presumably victims of big oil when gasoline prices rise, of big drug companies, or of big insurance companies when they raise their rates or dispute our claims. 

Especially in legal cases involving civil suits, attorneys first persuade prospective clients that they are victims (you’ve seen the ads on TV) then persuade juries that their clients are victims and someone should pay. In those same TV ads you often hear the word settlement, because the targets of these lawsuits fear that juries will buy into this point of view. It's cheaper to settle out of court, because those juries, from a basic lack of economic understanding, assume that a big corporation or insurance company will pay the cost out of their own pocket and it will never get back to us.

Claiming victimhood is an easy answer. It takes no effort. What went wrong is someone else’s fault; we are not to blame; we share none of the responsibility. It’s a passive stance. I don’t have a high-paying job, not because I didn’t bother to finish high school, but because I am being discriminated against. I got lung cancer not because I refused to quit smoking, but because the tobacco companies tricked me. My kids have too many toys not because I bought them, but because of the cartoons on the TV. The banks fooled me into getting a mortgage I couldn’t afford. When I have a sore knee, I ask the doctor for a pill or for surgery rather than losing some weight. I get to put all my problems in someone else’s hands. Responsible people don’t act like this, but victims do.

When we feel and act this way, we need to be protected. That’s when the warnings and regulations begin. Since these people can’t take care of themselves, we must require warnings on cigarette packages, on ladders, on hairdryers, and on almost every other product, telling them not to use them in ways that may seem stupid to the average person. When we sign up our kids to play sports, we must sign “hold harmless” forms. All the warnings don’t stop the lawsuits, so next come the regulations: all playgrounds must provide soft landings, all car trunks need an escape handle, all lawnmowers must have an automatic shutdown device, etc. Some cities ban the sale of certain foods or of fast food in certain neighborhoods. Victims are treated like children and must be protected from the real world and from themselves.

Where does it all end? The old analogy of boiling a frog applies. Throw a frog into boiling water and he jumps back out. Put him into a pot and slowly increase the temperature and he sits complacently until it’s too late. Likewise, when we don’t behave responsibly, our freedoms slowly trickle away.  Each of those efforts seems well-meaning and harmless at the time, but each is another example of someone restricting our choices for their interpretation of our own good. Each restriction is a loss of freedom, the consequence of patterns of behavior that show weaknesses in the dimension of responsibility.