Social responsibility or personal responsibility

I agree with all your observations on personal responsibility, such as:
1 -People don't like to admit their own failings,
2 - We've been led to believe that personal responsibility is what determines one's lot in life, w/o learning that personal responsibility only goes so far in a universe filled w/ events that one has no control over,
3 - We also fail to take into account that no one is independent. We ALL depend on the actions and accomplishments of others,
4 - People would rather insist that they were right, instead of actually BEING right, but being right also means that you have to be able to accept when you’re not. 
5- People insist that they're right when they're not because they haven't experienced enough success in their lives to be comfortable w/ accepting their failures also.

I would note though that while we have been led to believe and in some ways bought into personal responsibility being what determines one’s lot in life, we must not have bought into it too much if 1, 4, and 5 are accurate observations. It seems to be something we say we believe, vote like we believe, but apply more to others than ourselves. 

I only gave a partial answer previously when we were discussing personal and social responsibility, as I was being a little cantankerous insisting upon both with only partially explaining what I meant. I’ll see if I can do a little better job now, although only briefly (hopefully).

It seems to me people error mainly in thinking one precludes the other when in actuality complete personal responsibility and complete social responsibility are needed for an ideal community. 

It is our community’s social responsibility to tell us we must be productive or useful (in some way) member of that community and give us the opportunity (with as many options as possible) to actually do that. This includes giving us opportunities to admit and to the best of our ability make up for our mistakes or failures. However, as we all intuitively know there is no use in giving people unlimited chances until they seem to have understood, acknowledge, and done what they could to correct/make up for their mistakes. It would be irresponsible for the person and community to allow a member to continually extract resources from mistakes without demonstrating they have learned from past ones. 

Our personal responsibility is to be a useful or productive member of the community, to admit and make up for our mistakes to the best of our ability, and to learn/mature in the process to become more useful in our own direct contributions, our mentoring of other community members, and our administration of the community. 

I’d also suggest something like this is already practiced by a good portion of the privileged, amongst themselves. Of course a community should be considered the whole of a town or city at the very least and probably all of humanity or all of earth inhabitants.


After a friend asks me what I mean by "probably all of humanity."

I had done a better job than I often do with brevity and you aren’t going to let me get away with it? 

In that last sentence I was trying to very briefly define the scope of the community that owes this social responsibility to the individual in that community/society and that the individual owes the personal responsibility. Having further defined it like this taking it past all humans is problematic. 

We of course have a ton of different layers of communities within this largest community. For me examples would include my marriage, immediate family, extended family, friends, workplace, profession, neighborhood, my kid’s friend’s and families, school district, city, state, nation, etc. There would be nuances to each, but I think the basic dynamics I shared would apply to each, as well as how each of those layers or smaller communities would owe something akin to the personal responsibility to one another and the larger communities that encompass them.