Personal responsibility
There are a lot of things wrong with the world. Big, scary things, hugely outside the control of any one individual. Solving them seems near impossible to anyone save an imaginary superhero. One such problem is poverty, a regular killer. In the time it has taken you to read the above sentences, one child has died as a direct cause of poverty. Since this time yesterday 29,000 have died and 1 billion live below the poverty line. This problem appears insurmountable, impossible to solve. Who could possibly tackle such a problem to save millions of lives every year?
Another problem is war. War is conducted by men with guns, thousands upon thousands of them, filled with rage, or worse, cold calculating precision. They fight for freedom, democracy or riches, often confusing each of these for the other. What could one person do to solve all this? Who could possibly combat this problem which crosses the boarders of all countries? It appears to be part of society and has been since its existence. How could we stop this?
These issues are important, and upon learning all these facts, chances are you made a decision regarding what you could and could not do. You probably decided these problems were too big to be handled alone. You probably decided to give up and continue living your life. Most likely, you bought goods this past week, went to school or work, rode in a car. This would place you in the luckier half of the world— you don't need to do anything as you are not directly affected by war or poverty. Yet to remain passive when recognizing the harsh realities that taint our world would be to ignore the fundament of human civilization: personal responsibility. Indeed, the harmonious functioning of a civilized society is reliant on the basic principle of personal responsibility which states that we are responsible for our actions. This means that if people know they are partaking in an act that deserves punishment, they must receive the latter. It is thus essential that all actions detrimental to society receive consequences.
This raises the question of where personal responsibility begins and ends. For example, remember those five children that died while you where reading this? Well as it turns out they all died in a hut in rural India. The reason is they could not receive care for their malnourishment because their father was not able to obtain grain as he had spent the last of the money a year ago, buying genetically modified grain from a large agro-pharmaceutical corporation. The farmer was not able to re-use the grain because the corporation had failed to tell him that it was modified to stop the practice of reusing grain. Since, subsistence farmers such as this man could not pay off their debts and they eventually ran out of food. Now take the child that died during that last paragraph. He was a charming little boy from South America that lived too close to a coal mine owned by a large mining company. The mine produced so much dust that he died from tuberculosis caused by the noxious air. Remember that item you bought? That Brand Name™ chocolate bar? Guess what, the financial conglomerate that owns the chocolate bar company also owns the mining company and the agro-pharmaceutical corporation. As it turns out, this conglomerate uses the chocolate bar revenue to pioneer aggressive business practices in Peru and Bangladesh and throughout the world. But surely your bar only cost you a couple of francs…
Now picture a generic white collar worker. He goes to work in an office building in Sydney every day. His job is to push a pen from one edge of the paper to the other. He has friends, a wife, kids, and a car. In his sub-urban garden sits his dog, which he walks every week on Saturdays. He doesn't really care what he is doing. He studied accounting and continues in his career path because it is expected of him. Does it matter whether he is calculating the benefits made by that conglomerate of which we spoke earlier? Does it really matter whether the deficit he recorded last week forced the Board of Directors to call in special favors from men high in the US government to send a peace keeping force to protect American interests from rebellions sweatshop workers in some developing country? And anyway, what would the white-collar worker do? It is all so big, so distant, so disconnected. The important thing to remember at this point is that all these events are not independent of each other and that if even one of the cogs in the system were to stop, perhaps the ten or so kids that died when you were reading this article could have been saved.
If the white-collar worker and the co-workers at his office went on strike, if you decided to have an apple, or better still, a Max Havelaar banana instead of that chocolate bar, if the miners, the factory workers, the sweatshop slaves, were all to grind the machines to a halt, were all to work together in concerted effort, then the negative effects of these corporations could very well be stopped along with the machines and tools they used to chain us with. So why don't we? Because we don't want to take responsibility for our actions. We are cowards that don't want accept that we are every bit as responsible for poverty, death and destruction as the big corporations and governments we criticize. In many ways we are the big corporations and governments, and now we must face the fact that our actions are the cause of death and misery.
-By RzBz
