"Personal Responsibility!" They Snarl in Your Face

The term "personal responsibility" can be used in a lot of ways. However, there is a particular usage that grates on a great many nerves.

Consider the flinging of the words "Personal responsibility!" in the face of those who, for example, have lost their jobs in an economic downturn and have every reason to expect an even more than usually hard and long search before they find a new one, an outcome that is never certain and often means harder work for lower wages--all as the executives who caused the downturn, insisting on their bonuses as their companies extort the government for a bailout paid by the taxes of working people like those who have been losing their jobs, never hear such talk from the deferential legislators before whom they testify.

In that image, with its combination of "bound but unprotected/protected but unbound" inequality with a sanctimonious callousness in a situation where the fortunes of most are not reducible to individual morality, we have the essence of that utterance, and its grating. Here "Personal responsibility!" means leaving individuals to cope entirely on their own with systemic failures in which they had no say because those who have power derive short-term benefit from the situation and thus have no interest in altering the situation whatsoever, and indeed every interest in resisting any alteration to the situation whatsoever--climate change, pandemic, the insanities attendant on hyper-financialization, the ever-worsening nightmare of personal cyber-security, etc., etc., ad infinitum and ad nauseam--with the communication of this the nastier for the attack on those who would criticize the situation in any way being dressed up as morality by those too stupid to know the difference between "morality" and "moralizing," or simply taking too much pleasure in striking poses of superiority as they say mean and hurtful things to others to respect that difference.