So as a kid, I was raised on the idea of taking responsibility and accountability for mistakes, actions, and work. I have always been kind of neurotic about making sure all that I do is proper, but I’ve lately been questioning if it’s even worth it.
Being an adult, all I ever see is evasion of responsibility.
Evasion of taxes Evasion of liability in car accidents Evasion of responsibility for mistakes etc.
For example, if you get into a car-wreck, the first thing anyone does is try to pin responsibility and liability on you for injuries and property even if you were in the right.
If something goes wrong, it’s never that person’s fault. If something goes right, it wasn’t just your work.
Idk, it’s a really random thought I had this morning. No one wants to take the blame, I get that, but the idea of evading responsibility is so deeply ingrained in our culture, that insurance companies use AI to auto-reject claims to avoid payouts.
I could go on with this little reflection, but I just find it so hypocritical that I was raised to act responsibly when American society’s MO is the exact opposite in the most fundamental ways.
The issue with society is people want the freedom to do things without the responsibility of doing it. People want guns but want no responsibility to be properly trained. People want to drive but no responsibility when they crash. People want to do onlyfans with no responsibility for how people view them. People want food and housing but no responsibility to provide that. People want safety but not the responsibility to maintain it. People want to do drugs but not the responsibility of what that does to society. People want immigration but not the responsibility to ensure social cohesion is maintained.
Everyone wants everyone else to be responsible for them while having no responsibility themselves. I guess that’s why socialism appeals to so many a big government to be responsible for everything so u don’t have to be responsible for anything.
That’s not what socialism is about though. It’s about being responsible not just for yourself, but for the society you live in as well. Being all about yourself is nice, but you need other people, you need a functional society around. The responsible and intelligent thing to do is to support the society you live in, to pool finance to be able to afford things you (or most other people) wouldn’t be able to afford. Social solidarity is another level of responsibility.
You are connecting things that aren’t connected, consolidating very different examples into one and same, but that’s neither helpful or productive. Oversimplifying to the point of confusing the very premise is making your point seem like nonsense, even if you have a trace of a valid point in there.
Responsibility does not work like you present it. Nor does freedom. There are different types of responsibility, and different types of freedoms, with a scale for each, not a binary option.
Some of those responsibilities do go hand in hand with your proposed contrasting freedom, but not all. And all of that to a very much varying degree.
So when you ultimately connect it all to socialism, it just comes off as lazy critique against socialism, instead of a point about responsibilities vs. freedoms. Which just makes the entire thing moot, and finally explains the dissonance with the examples given.
Not a great contribution in my opinion. Just explaining my downvote as a general gesture of goodwill.
I feel this is just u rationalising ur downvote to urself. Plus my points don’t need to be good or well justified effective propaganda only cares how many times I say it.
That is what it is also, but doing it adjacent to your original comment, in public, makes it a gesture of goodwill in addition to that. I didn’t have to type it out and post it, but I felt I wanted to explain myself, and chose to do that as a comment and spend some of my time and energy, as a gesture, despite me not having to do that.
But you are also correct in your other point there.
However I didn’t intend to mean your post was propaganda if that was a sarcastic slight against me in that sense, just that I didn’t agree with the argument it tied to at the end, nor all of the examples chosen. But I felt there was an agreeable insight there about people avoiding the balance of responsibility vs. freedom at the start of the post, so I wanted to try and show that there was a valid point there, and explain why I downvoted despite my agreement there, with a genuinely well intended gesture.
Edit: I will admit, I was a little bit annoyed by the ending of your post, so in the moment my original comment did end up being more rude than it had to, for which I am genuinely sorry.