Where is Personal Responsibility?

A recent article in the Hillsdale College Imprimis May/June 2014 publication was adapted from a speech delivered by Dr. Anthony Daniels entitled "The Worldview that Makes the Underclass."  In this speech, Dr. Daniels, who also writes under the penname of Theodore Dalrymple, revealed some startling facts he discovered during his years as a doctor and psychiatrist in Birmingham, England.  Here are just a few to chew on:

"Everyone lived in households with a shifting cast of members, rather than in families."

"If there was an adult male resident, he was generally a bird of passage with a residence of his own somewhere else."

"To ask a child who his father was had become an almost indelicate question.  Sometimes the child would reply, 'Do you mean my father at the moment?'"

"By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home."

While these fact are certainly startling to those of more conventional sensibilities, here are two statements that demonstrate the depth to which our culture has reduced the sense of responsibility:

"Few homes were without televisions with screens as large as a cinema—sometimes more than one—and they were never turned off, . . . But what was curious was that these homes often had no means of cooking a meal, or any evidence of a meal ever having been cooked beyond the use of a microwave, and no place at which a meal could have been eaten in a family fashion." 

"Surveys have shown that a fifth of British children do not eat a meal more than once a week with another member of their household, and many homes do not have a dining table."

With this as a backdrop, Dr. Daniels proceeds to share that what people mean is often not what they say.  One must take heed to the way something is expressed to derive the subtleties of what is being said.  His example involved a murderer saying of his/her action, "the knife went in," rather than "I stabbed him/her."  Semantics?  Think about the implication.  Dr. Daniel asserts, "it implied that it was the knife that guided the hand rather than the hand that guided the knife."  Why would one seek to separate the intent and the action?  One logical explanation is that the individual sought to remove, or seriously diminish, personal responsibility for what happened.  

Such is the case when someone claims that substance abuse, physical abuse, or some other moral impropriety is a “disease” for which there is no cure, but merely an ability to mitigate consequences through interventions, replacement medication, or some form of self-help support. Dr. Daniel states, “In the United States, the National Institute of Drug Abuse defines addiction quite baldly as a chronic relapsing brain disease—and nothing else.  I hesitate to say it, but this seems to me straightforwardly a lie, told to willing dupes in order to raise funds from the federal government.”

He further clarifies, “Be that as it may, the impression has been assiduously created and peddled among the addicts that they are the helpless victims of something that is beyond their own control, which means that they need the technical assistance of what amounts to a substantial bureaucratic apparatus to overcome it.”

What place does responsibility play? Dr. Daniel contends, “. . . the whole basis of the supposed treatment for their supposed disease is rooted in lies and misconceptions.”  He states that research has demonstrated that most addicts spend at least 18 months abusing heroin sporadically before they become “addicted.”  All during the intermittent use, the abuser is well aware of the consequences of heroin use.  Daniels concludes, “In other words, they show considerable determination in becoming addicts:  It is something, for whatever reason, that they want to become.  It is something they do, rather than something that happens to them.”

Just as Dr. Daniels’ examples of the poor communities in Birmingham, England demonstrate the social results of a lack of responsibility, so a life wasted in the mire of substance abuse demonstrates the consequence that results when one fails to accept responsibility for his/her own actions relating to the use of mind-altering substances in an illicit or illegal manner.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.