I wonder what Albert would say if he could see capitalist society in 2008? Yikes

Meanwhile, it’s simply a choice we all have to make: Are the problems we face rooted more in personal (micro) or collective (macro) choices? Nobody doubts that both levels matter, but you have to make an intellectual judgment about where on the continuum you’re going to draw your x.

I say fix the collective and the personal will follow. Merely fixing the personal is not only a pipe dream, it’s extremely weak, often irrelevant. We have millions of angels in this nation, but they are largely excluded from positions of real power. Even the great Noam Chomsky can’t get on corporate TV.

You intend to make these changes by committee?

Of course it can’t be done by one person acting alone. But you have the sequence wrong. Until a few take charge and get it right they many won’t have anything to follow.

Few I guess would be 3 or more. 1+1+1=3.

Greed and power-tripping are also great personal dangers that emanate from our collective situation.

Not only do I disagree with this familiar claim, but I’m not even sure what it means.

Are you saying that we can’t run our collective affairs better until everybody, or at least a big majority, are acting like saints at the individual level? If that can be done without/before changing the behavioral environment, then why bother worrying about the collective level?

I am much more inclined to say what strikes me as true: “You can never have widespread personal responsibility without collective first.” Unless and until you arrange the collective priorities and institutions to facilitate and encourage stability and happiness and genuinely proper individual behaviors, they won’t happen. Unemployment, poverty, and commercial television are incompatible with maximum personal responsibility. Anger, depression, and misinformation are real problems, and people naturally don’t respond well when under their influence.

I am on welfare (SSDI, Section 8, etc.). I am there because of inability to work.

My illness is not even recognized by orthodox medicine. By taking responsibility, going to the library, searching the internet, treating myself effectively I am slowly getting well.

I’m a Yankee, I love to work. Life on the couch sucks.

The reagonites would find me to be irresponsible simply because I’m not well enough to work and there is no valid test (yet) to show how I am ill, much less a functional treatment.

I would like you to see that you will never ever have collective responsibility without personal first. It’s not an amoeba.

Look at how some commentors here hide behind pseudonyms. How brave is that? If I were Noticed and incarcerated for thinking unacceptably I would die for lack of proper care.

Come out, come out whoever you are. Make statements in your real name. What you have to lose is the problem, there is your trap.

“Personal responsibility” demagoguery is a Reaganite political trick, a distraction from what matters. Make the conditions to encourage it (e.g. provide a living-wage job for every adult who wants one), and it happens automatically. Ignore those conditions, and you go nowhere.

And, P.S.: How many of the “personal responsibility” peddlers can pass their own test? Not many.

You did not mention responsibility so it seemed I should bring it up.

Americans seem to have a confusion concerning freedom. They seem to equate it with privilege.

The cops, doctors and politicians, various corporate alliances, foundations, think tanks, and lobby groups, as well as the public health industry, the various federal and state burocracies, as well as a disturbing number of shadow government groups and projects have already taken “responsibility in [our] stead…”

That was my point. It’s absurd to imply that people have simply abdicated their responsibility for themselves, their families, their communities, and that, consequently, the hotshots have stepped in to take up the reins. While details may clash, the contrary is consistently true throughout the modern world.
Corporate “capitalism” can not function when people are allowed to take responsibility for their lives. Beginning with the enclosure movements in the UK, ordinary people have been precluded from access to the essential natural resources in their environments. “Legally” barred from the right to forage / gather food from forests, and from the right to hunt, fish, cut down trees, create farms and gardens, etc., people faced misery, starvation, crushing poverty, and a complete lack of options. What did they do?

They did what the State knew they would have to do when they passed the laws – they went off to various population centers to work in slave labor conditions for greedy, inhuman / antihuman businesses which, in the absence of any alternatives, could use, abuse, and toss them aside at whim. Enclosure, in one way or another, has been the world model for states and for capitalism for centuries. Licences, too, in their almost infinite forms, are a type of enclosure, though “public safety” is the reason generally given for their requirement.

The US, especially, has been relentless and quite savage in seeing to it that there simply are no alternatives to a life of service to the system. Native Americans were butchered NOT simply because they sometimes attempted to stand up to the growing power and relentless expansion of the US government and population, but because tribalism offered an alternative way to live, a most tempting and human “out” from the terrible systems being developed by modern business. All alternatives, great and small, must be eliminated, and they have been. Big media portrayed the Black Panthers as a bunch of big, scary black guys with guns. In reality, the Panthers were a community oriented group, teaching residents of Black communities to take care of themselves and their friends and neighbors. They, too, were butchered. All alternatives, all opportunities for people to take responsibility for their own lives must be crushed.

Corporations have mimicked this process, by lobbying for increasing numbers of increasingly severe laws and “acceptable practices,” precluding ordinary people from taking charge of any aspect of their lives. Instead, one must turn to government or corporations or to a growing number of experts to satisfy any and all needs. Government and corporations have forcibly taken over the education of our children, who are forcibly removed from our homes when they are only 5 or 6 years old. They’ve precluded us from dealing with our own health care needs, assisting the AMA and physician groups in keeping the number of doctors abnormally low in order that fees may be absurdly high. They’ve made sure that alternatives to the medical system are entirely and universally illegal… You may know how to care for a variety of physical problems and illnesses but if you’re not a licensed medical practitioner, you’ll go to jail if you try to help out. Hell, I could make this list as long as an encyclopedia and still not exhaust the many ways in which the State has made it – a crime! – for us to take responsibility for our own lives and for those we love and live among.

Freedom IS responsibility. Freedom IS order…

If you feel this analysis is incorrect, John, I’d be delighted if you’d enlighten us with some specifics.

We need more responsibility.

You are as free as you are individually responsible.

Responsibility is what is discouraged. Let the experts (cops, doctors, politicians) take responsibility in your stead and you have had it.

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Vote McCain no Obama. Climate change is real, no it’s a hoax. The polar ice cap is melting that’s just normal. President Bush feels your pain. Free your mind. How do you do that? Don’t ask for so much ask for more. The have and have more’s are right. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Decisions, decisions and witch one is right. May the force be with you Joeblow.

Now of course this was just from the movie the Matrix and has no basis in the real world now does it?

The plain logical fact is that letting corporate investors select our macro-options for us means that we were destined to live as we now do in the United States, where cars, television, and highly processed foods and products literally dictate the ways we move, think and feel. It’s all as bad for our health and happiness as it is profitable to the Richistanis among/above us. M Dawson

Call, call now. I am going to watch the Olympics on my flat screen TV then get into my small SUV and go get a happiness meal. I could have had a V-8 and took my bike to the bookstore. No, I don’t believe it. It’s not possible. I didn’t say it would be easy, I just said it would be the truth.

I’m uncomfortable with this obesity stuff because, as with the war on smokers, the corporations will not suffer, will not really be reigned in, but, rather, ordinary folks will be vilified, screwed, “denormalized” ( the official term ) and robbed – all for “the public good.” Moreover, it’s hard for me ( an uneducated dilettante ) to understand how this sudden leap in fat folks can be attributed to sugar and fat intake brought on by corporate marketing. Sure, the corporations push crap, but they always have. I grew up in the fifties and cartoon and kid tv shows were overflowing with ads for crappy foods and snacks and drinks. There’s little change, as far as I can discern. We lived on sugar, then sat down to fatty foods at the dinner table. There was no “epidemic” of obesity.

Rather, it seems to me that the culture, the entire system in which we all pretend to “live,” is gradually turning us into drones, afraid to run, play, laugh, take risks, be foolish…. or to do anything at all without seeking “expert opinion.”
Don’t go outside, the sun will kill you, or you’ll get bitten by a bug and get Lyme disease, or you’ll get too near to some bird droppings and get some sort of horrible bird flu, or you’ll be bitten by mosquitoes and get West Nile Virus… Besides, there are so many predators out there – children are at risk, of course, but so are all of us! Beware of strangers! In any case, before you go out to play, whether you’re a kid or an adult, you should probably consult with your doctor. You may be putting yourself or your children at risk if you just “willy-nilly” go outside!
Whatever’s bothering you, we now have a “medical diagnosis” for it, and we have drugs to treat it!
Stay in, watch tv, play video games, take your medicines, order something over the internet! Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t drink coffee, don’t eat sugary foods, don’t eat fatty foods, lower your cholesterol numbers, check your bone density scores… See your doctor… Aargh!

The same bunch of “experts” who created this horrific mess are now going to help us find a way out, but their cures will be worse than their diseases, since the system will go on, and they represent the system – they ARE the system.

People in the “developed West” are healthier and live longer than at any time in history, yet we’re still all f `d up. Why? Well, we’re miserable. We’re enslaved, and everything we do is overseen and approved or disapproved by a vast bureaucratic superstructure which, ultimately doesn’t care at all about whether or not we’re healthy. They care about the money… Let me say that again: Neither government nor the corporations nor foundations like the Robert Wood Johnson foundation could care at all about whether or not we’re healthy. It’s all about the money. Somewhere inside, we all know this, so we’re paranoid, and rightly so. Hence, studies to see what our “safety and happiness” numbers are. Oops, we’re only # 28!

We don’t need more studies, we need more freedom. We don’t need more “exercise programs,” we need more freedom. We don’t need a war on big advertising, we need more freedom. We don’t need more cutesy essays like this one – we need more freedom. We don’t need more rules and regulations and wars on smokers, fat folks, etc., etc., etc… Slaves get sick and fall apart… Free people can find their own way. We need more freedom.