The Myth of Personal Responsibility
Urban reality contains mass human suffering in the form of a large homeless population.
Society’s acceptance of this suffering presents an ostensible conflict when acknowledging the presence of Christian values in our culture.
Maintaining society’s moral integrity encourages it to interpret homelessness as a manifestation of a large-scale absence of personal responsibility, exculpating greater society from possible blame.
Although referencing the idea of personal responsibility provides comfort in the presence of a perpetually impoverished group of people, it does not in fact explain the existence of America’s homeless population. Instead, placing economic responsibility solely on individuals artificially severs us from our historical and socio-economic context, accepting a profoundly reactionary socially constructed economy as a natural given of life.
Appeals to personal responsibility do not stand up well to interrogation. For the idea of personal responsibility cannot explain historic fluctuations of homelessness in the U.S., nor can it explain the discrepancies in homeless populations within different nations. Personal responsibility, often subsuming references to human nature or human laziness, fails to explain why the U.S. homeless population rose markedly after President Reagan eliminated federal subsidies for low income housing by 98 percent in the mid-1980s. Nor can personal responsibility explain why homelessness likewise rose after the same president closed down government institutions housing the mentally ill.
An explanation for homelessness emphasizing personal responsibility finds it difficult to account for Western Europe’s relatively low level of homelessness.
Can it be that Swedes simply have a higher level of personal responsibility? Or does their economic system, featuring a more restrained capitalism, explain this discrepancy instead? The correlation existing between economic factors and homelessness between 1974 and 1988 suggests that there is more at work in the lives of America’s homeless population than capricious yet dramatic shifts in the presence of personal responsibility.
Arguments attempting to justify homelessness through appeals to personal responsibility are either made in bad faith or ignorance. Knowledge of basic economic law, a fair standard for espousing beliefs concerning economic reality, necessitates acknowledging capitalism’s inherent characteristics.
This is seldom done, as doing so would undermine ubiquitous myths concerning the nature of our society, leading to its crisis. The idea that everyone has a chance to financially succeed in our society, exemplified by the rags to riches Horatio Alger model, informs the belief in personal responsibility. Yet, the theoretical dictates, history, and immediate reality of capitalism demonstrates both the necessity of a permanent underclass of workers, and the undesirability and calculated avoidance of full employment.
Whereas some individuals may on occasion achieve dramatic upward mobility, the poor as a class are permanent, and must remain so for capitalism’s perpetuation. It is capitalism’s own logic that requires a surplus army of labor, one that can be delved into during economic expansions and eliminated during recessions. It is also capitalism’s own logic that discourages full employment; altering the leverage between employer and employee, ensuing increased wages trigger the offsetting raise in prices, creating inflation. It is not free choice, ideological arbitrariness highlighted during President Nixon and Clinton’s terms suggests, that leads our modern presidents to roll back society’s safety net. Demands for ever-increasing profit, rejected since the 1974 global recession, requires relentless privatizing of previously public economic sectors. Formerly debunked Neoliberal economic theory revitalized in a collapsing world economy, immediate economic exigencies legitimizing corporate ideology demanding unlimited tax relief at the expense of public not private welfare, necessarily, not accidentally.
Human relationships within capitalism are organized similarly to those within feudalism, with some significant distinctions. Capitalism’s wage labor creates a huge class of indentured servants, whose time and lives they must sell for their survival. Yet, unlike past societies, American capitalism is characterized by widespread internalization of ideas maintaining society’s ultimate fairness and legitimacy. Phrases such as “personal responsibility” are commonly uttered by those suffering forty-hour workweeks of stultifying labor, and systematic exploitation through their role as consumer. Rather than offering ready-made answers, we can best proceed in improving society by initiating relationships of questions, developing in perpetuity. However, if we do not relentlessly examine the origins, functions, and ramifications of the thought and language articulating these questions, we will not be destined to get very far.
Joshua