Everyone experiences responsibility differently. I take the ‘creator’ point of view. Regardless of your personal definition, there are at least three different ‘reasons’ for responsibility. A large portion follow Freud’s view that we are all searching primarily for pleasure. Satre asserted we are here for power. The third is associated with Victor Frankl who said we are looking for meaning.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote “Absolute responsibility is not resignation; it is the logical requirement of the consequences of our freedom. What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it. Moreover everything which happens to me is mine.”
Werner Erhard wrote “responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, or guilt. All these include judgments and evaluations of good and bad, right and wrong, or better and worse. They are derived from a ground of being in which Self is considered to be a thing or an object rather than a context.”
Today many people see it as governments ‘responsibility’ for guaranteeing more and more of what is actually ours to stand for, to be responsible for. Freedom and liberty only become possible when you SAY [not believe] responsibility starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from and with the point of view, whether at the moment realized or not, that you are the source of what you are, what you do, and what you have. This point of view extends to include even what is done to you and ultimately what another does to another.
Making the government, the police, GOD or anyone and anything else responsible for anything that happens takes away your power and your ability to create a new beginning, your say in meaning.
What, where and when do you take responsibility… and perhaps as important why would you?
The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected. – Viktor E. Frankl
