Responsibility- A Guest Post by Christopher J. Fearnley
Chris Fearnley has sent me his thoughts on personal responsibility
as a guest post on the Buck Says Friday Open Mic. He thinks I have
done some poetic waxing of the subject. I’m not sure he is thrilled
with my poetic wax job. Here are Chris’s thoughts. Buck
Responsibility Revisited
by CJ Fearnley
I noticed Paul Krugman’s blog [1] which observes that our last three
Presidents took their predecessors to task on the issue of
responsibility in their inaugural addresses. In the Buck Says blog, I
found three prior posts which wax poetic about responsibility
[2] [3] [4].
Is responsibility a silver bullet to solve all problems and explain
all crises? Well, since it is so universally acknowledged as important,
there must be something to it! But whatever validity responsibility
may have, it hasn’t been enough to prevent very many crises.
This issue seems worth a good think.
First of all, I think we should recognize that each of our Presidents
did their absolute best. Of course, each of them failed to be as
effective as we would have liked. Emanuel Lasker, one of the greatest
Chess World Champions, said “In life we are all duffers”. It is true:
each of us blunders through with mistake after mistake. It is not
irresponsibility:it is called “being human”!
But the question arises: How do we go deeper into understanding the
siren that distracts us from our deep, universal commitment to
responsibility? Why do we, despite our best efforts, end up looking
irresponsible to others? How can we understand and overcome this
responsibility gap?
If I may be so bold as to suggest an idea: our responsibility falters
when we fail to attend to all of the salient issues in a situation
comprehensively. Being comprehensive in our considerations is hard:
it means you have to see everything including the unknown unknowns and
take them into account too! Very hard. So we settle for doing what is
best for Number One, or our family or our country, or what our “gut”
tells us. Inevitably, we fail to consider some of the salient issues
and the consequences of our short-sightedness hits us hard.
In short, people do not set out to be irresponsible, they try to do
their earnest best. Unfortunately, as weak, totally ignorant at birth,
mistake-making human beings, our best is often inadequate. And so we
can get into big trouble.
Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics [5] is one of the few resources
Humanity has been endowed with that works to develop a discipline for
comprehensive thinking. That is why I feel that, the
Synergetics Collaborative (http://synergeticists.org/), is so critical
to help us out of this and future crises: we need Synergetics and its
tools for comprehensive thinking to help us think and act more responsibly.
Here are a few easy steps anyone can take to begin working toward
comprehensive thinking. First, acknowledge the earnest effort of even
those with whom we disagree: we are all mistake-making blunderers and
it is important that we recognize that. And secondly, suggest ideas
and issues which you see need to be considered, but others seem to be
unaware of. Then we can have healthy discussions where we learn from
each other and work toward a more comprehensively considerate and thus
a more responsible future.
[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/shared-responsibility/
[2] On Dec 26th at http://www.bucksays.com/black-market-candy-bars/
[3] Again on Dec 6th at
http://www.bucksays.com/business-rebuilding-after-the-sub-prime-attack/
[4] On Nov 12th:
http://www.bucksays.com/bubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble/
[5] The full text of Synergetics is on-line:
http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/synergetics.html
In particular, “Introduction: The Wellspring of Reality”
http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/intro/well.html is an
excellent introduction to the ideas behind some of these ideas.
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