170 - Personal Responsibility Pt1
A strong sense of responsibility makes for strong character. But how much is too much? When do we stop taking responsibility for predatory laws and businesses?
During the Great Depression, average Americans blamed themselves for the financial struggles, believing they were at fault for their own misfortune. Even while banks were gambling with their money, companies were throwing away food and clothes, and farms were collapsing, pastors and politicians still told the people they were at fault for not taking personal responsibility. Obviously we understand the system itself was flawed, with weak regulation over Wall Street, poor responses by the Federal Reserve, and a lack of support from President Herbert Hoover. There’s no way we’d fall for the old Hoover rallying cry of “The people will fix our system, not the system itself!” …right?
Today we’ll look at how modern marketing and lobbyist campaigns have continued to tout “personal responsibility” as they create more and more unbalanced systems designed to put Americans into debt. We’ll look at the food companies that are shouting “Personal Responsibility!” as they put garbage into elementary schools, and which piece of “nudge psychology” has been hijacked to send us all into consumerism overdrive.
Knowing where to take personal responsibility, and which factors are actually within our control, is both the cornerstone of stoicism and a necessity to maintain strong internal locus of control. In this conversation, we discuss the line between actual personal responsibility, and the false concept of personal responsibility that gets used as a scapegoat for bad mortgages, bad medical debt, and bad policies overall.
History Links:
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/firsthand-accounts-great-depression
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/04/10/lunchables-lead-consumer-reports-school-cafeteria/
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/10/1243939166/lunchables-consumer-reports-school-lunch
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1198909604
Science Links:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10017337/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3695078/