“A Culture of Accountability” is the last chapter of Dr. Branden’s recent book, “Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life.” In the previous chapters, Dr. Branden demonstrates how personal responsibility is at the core of successful living. He defines what it means for individuals to “take responsibility for themselves” and explains why taking responsibility for oneself is necessary for personal power and happiness. In this chapter, Dr. Branden describes the cultural and political implications of the previous chapters.

Ultimately, an attitude of self-responsibility must be generated from within the individual. It cannot be “given” from the outside, just as self-esteem cannot.
And yet we can appreciate that there are social environments in which people are more likely to learn self-responsibility and environments in which they are less likely. There are social philosophies and policies that encourage independence, and there are others that encourage dependence. The average person is not so autonomous that he or she will generate the appropriate attitudes in a culture that is rewarding the opposite.

So let us shift our examination of self-responsibility from the “inside” to the “outside”—from the individual to the human environment in which he or she lives and acts.

I will begin with a story.

One of the pleasures in being a psychotherapist is the opportunity to experiment with mildly mischievous solutions to clients’ difficulties. Here is an incident taken from my clinical practice.

Nadine R. was a thirty-eight-year-old mother and office manager who worked on personal problems with me via the telephone. (I do a good deal of psychotherapy on the telephone with clients who call from other cities.) My office is in Los Angeles, and her home is in Minneapolis. This afternoon she sounded desperate.

“ God, I wish you were a woman today!” were her first words. “I don’t know if a man will have sympathy for this problem.”

She presented the following dilemma. Her husband was a research scientist who had his own laboratory; she ran his office in addition to running their home and raising their two teenage boys. She made only one request of them: When she entered her kitchen to make dinner, she wanted to find the garbage pail empty and all dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Her husband and sons agreed to take turns discharging this responsibility but rarely followed through. Before she began to cook, she usually had to clean up the kitchen, which she resented. The men in her family agreed that she was absolutely right, only nothing ever changed.

“ I’ve reasoned with them,” Nadine said, “I’ve pleaded, I’ve screamed, I’ve begged—nothing works. I feel utterly ineffectual. What should I do?”

“ Are you absolutely committed to getting a change?” I asked.

“ I’d do anything,” she declared.

“ Good. I think you can help these gentlemen to keep their promises—if you’ll do exactly as I say. We’re going to conduct an experiment.”

Next evening, when she found the kitchen dirty, she walked into the living room and began reading a book. When her puzzled husband and sons inquired about dinner, she answered, smiling pleasantly, “I don’t cook in a dirty kitchen.” (I had told her, “No reproaches and no explanations.”) The men exchanged disoriented looks and disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later, when they informed her it was now spotless, she proceeded—cheerfully—to prepare their dinner.

The next night the kitchen was clean when she first entered it.

The night after that, the garbage pail was full again and there were dirty dishes on the counter. (I had told her this was likely.) Without saying a word, she went out and resumed her reading. Soon she heard them reproaching one another for not cleaning up and negotiating who would be responsible for what.

For several weeks, she entered a clean kitchen at dinnertime. I had warned her to be prepared for at least one more “test.” But when once again she found the kitchen dirty, she was tempted to overlook it because of their recent efforts. They’ve been so good, she thought. I had cautioned her that this was the moment at which the experiment would succeed or fail, depending on the consistency of her response. So she summoned all her willpower and went back to her book.

That ended the problem. What she had not accomplished with years of words, she accomplished within weeks through her actions.

I said to her, “If something doesn’t work, don’t keep doing it. Pay attention to outcomes. You needed to change your behavior to get them to change theirs. You gave them a strong reason to cooperate with you and do what they had promised to do. The moral of the story is: When you hit a wall, look for new actions to take.”

“ What I finally saw,” she remarked, “is that if I was always willing to make up for their defaults, I wasn’t really giving them any persuasive reason to change. When I gave them a reality that required that they do what they had agreed to do—surprise, surprise—their actions changed.”

This story has implications for child-rearing and for society at large.

Encouraging Self-Responsibility in Young People

An attitude of self-responsibility is most likely to flourish where there is good, basic self-esteem. When parents and teachers convey their belief in a young person’s competence and worth, they are laying the best possible groundwork not only for the emergence of self-esteem but also for self-responsibility and independence. What we want to discuss here are two simple ideas:

• Young people are most likely to learn self-responsibility from adults who personally exemplify it in their behavior.
• Young people are most likely to learn self-responsibility if their parents and teachers require it.

In other words, if adults model self-responsibility and convey their belief that young people are capable of operating self-responsibly and are expected to do so, and if adults deal with them a consistently from this perspective, the probability is that young people will respond positively and grow into self-responsibility.

Children are unlikely to learn self-responsibility from adults who are passive, self-pitying, prone to blaming and alibis, and who invariably explain their life circumstances on the basis of someone else’s actions or on “the system.” Such adults do not teach self-responsibility, and if they do pay lip service to it, they are probably not convincing.

If, however, children grow up in a home or are educated in a school system among adults who hold themselves accountable for what they do, are honest about acknowledging their mistakes, carry their own weight in relationships, and work for what they want in life, there is a good probability, although never an absolute guarantee, that this behavior will be perceived as normal and as what is appropriate to a human being.

Occasionally, a child is so appalled by the passivity and immaturity of one or both parents that in reaction the child learns self-responsibility very early. But this is not the most likely outcome and in any event is a hard way to learn.

Apart from exemplifying self-responsibility themselves, the greatest contribution adults can make is to convey to young people that self-responsibility is what is expected and required. Here are examples of what this policy might mean in action:

• A boy makes so much noise at the dinner table that no else is able to enjoy the meal. Mother says, “You have a choice. You can eat by yourself in the kitchen, or you can hold the noise level down when we’re eating. You decide.” When the boy continues with his uproar, Mother says, “I see you’ve decided to eat by yourself”—and separates him from the family dinner table. Later, when he agrees to eat in a more acceptable manner, Mother says, “I’m glad you’ve decided to eat with us. We’ve missed you.” She is helping her son to understand that he has choices and that actions have consequences, and that he is cared for. Note that she does so without lectures, insults, ridicule, or abuse; she speaks with respect for his dignity.

• A high school girl asks permission to use the family car. Permission is given on the understanding that she must always return the car with a full tank of gas; this is discussed explicitly between her and her father. Three times in a row she fails to fill the tank as promised. He with draws driving privileges for a month, saying, “I see you’ve decided not to use the car for a while. I will respect your decision.” When he overhears her telling a girlfriend, “My parents won’t let me have the car ‘cause I didn’t deliver on my promise to bring it home with a full tank”—he later tells her, “Thank you for the honesty of your explanation to your friend. I appreciate your taking responsibility for your actions.” This simple acknowledgment is worth more than any sermon on morality.

• A teenage boy who is hardworking and an A-student announces his intention to take a year off, after finishing high school, to travel. His father asks, “What are your plans for financing this adventure?” His son speaks of the money he has been saving and of the work he plans to do this coming summer to earn additional money. His father says, “I appreciate your strong sense of purpose. Tell you what I’ll do—I’ll match any amount of money you are able to get together by the time you’re ready to go.” He is not afraid to offer help to a boy who shows such self-motivation and independence.

• A daughter in her twenties, with a long record of acting irresponsibly and counting on her parents to bail her out, has been cautioned by her mother that she is now on her own and that her family may no longer be regarded as a financial resource. Just the same, the daughter phones and in a panicky voice announces that she has only two months’ rent left and does not know what to do. “This is a real challenge for you,” her mother says pleasantly. The daughter says, “My boss let me go just because I was late to work a few times last month.” Her mother says, “Uh-huh.” The daughter wails, “What will I do?” Her mother answers, “I really don’t know.” Disoriented because the old maneuvers aren’t working, the daughter persists, “Soon I’ll be out of money!” “This sounds like a real tough problem,” her mother answers. “My boss is a real stinker,” the daughter announces. Her mother inquires, “You mean, because he needed you at work on time?” “Mother!” the daughter shrieks, “What am going to do?” The mother responds benevolently, “I have absolute confidence in your ability to find a solution. I’ve been remiss in the past by bailing you out and not helping you develop your inner strength. Is there anything else, dear? I really need to be going now.” The mother knows that by always rescuing her daughter in the past, she had given her grounds to believe she did not have to take responsibility for her own life. Now it is time to provide the education she regretted not providing years earlier. She knows that her daughter is not stupid and not infirm and is not going to die: She will find a way to survive and may become stronger in the process. Is success guaranteed? It cannot be. But in these circumstances her greatest gift to her daughter is to go “on strike.” I have counseled many parents to this policy, and more often than not in later years their children acknowledged the wisdom of what was done. And I have seen children destroyed by parents who refused to stop being “helpful.”

In nature, if we behave irresponsibly we suffer the consequences not because nature is “punishing” us but because of simple cause and effect. If we do not plant food, we do not reap a harvest. If we are careless about fire, we destroy our property. If we build a raft without securing the logs properly, the raft comes apart in the water and we may lose our belongings or drown. None of this happens because reality is angry with us. If reality could speak, it might say, “It’s nothing personal.”

Parents who wish to encourage self-responsibility teach consequences, teach cause and effect. We don’t want to eat with you if you make the experience unpleasant for us. We won’t lend you the car if you keep returning it with an empty tank. If you show evidence of self-responsibility, we’ll be inspired to assist you in your goals. If we see you repeatedly living unthinkingly, we refuse to go on being a rescuer—we refuse to care more about your life than you do. If you want dinner, honor your promise to keep the kitchen clean—I don’t cook in a dirty kitchen. In this way, we can teach natural consequences, not artificial punishments.

If other people are not willing to make up the deficit, no one would imagine he or she could get away with living irresponsibly. Reality would very quickly correct any such delusion. It is the intervention of others that allows some people to believe that theirs is to wish while it is the job of others to provide, theirs to dream while others must act, theirs to suffer while others must produce solutions, theirs to feel while others must think.

Unfortunately, we often see people working to make up for others’ defaults, while wondering bitterly why those others aren’t practicing self-responsibility. Yet are not those others daily given evidence that they can get away with their passivity and manipulative helplessness?

If there is one truth that psychologists of the most divergent views agree on, it is that if you wish to encourage a particular pattern of behavior, you do not reward its opposite.

This brings us to the subject of culture, political philosophy, and social policy.

Responsibility and Community

The traditional American values of individualism, self-reliance, self-discipline, and hard work had their roots, in part, in the fact that this country began as a frontier nation where everything had to be created.

To be sure, most Americans exhibited a strong sense of community, and they certainly practiced mutual aid. But this was not seen as a substitute for self-responsibility. Independent people helped one another when they could, but everyone was expected to carry his or her own weight. People were not encouraged to believe they enjoyed special “entitlements.”

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the revolutionary idea that a human being had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This meant not that he or she was owed anything by others, but rather that others—including the government—were to respect the individual’s freedom and the inviolability of his or her person. It is only by the use of force or fraud (which is an indirect form of force) that human rights can be infringed on, and it was force and fraud that were, in principle, barred from human relationships.

This rejection of the initiation of force in human relationships was the translation into political and social reality of the eighteenth-century precept of natural rights—that is, rights held by individuals not as a gift from the state but rather by virtue of being human. This idea was one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment.

The principle of inalienable rights was never adhered to with perfect consistency. The U.S. government claimed the privilege of certain exceptions from the very beginning. And yet the principle remained the guiding vision of the American system. For a very long time, it was what America stood for: Freedom. Individualism. Private property. The right to the pursuit of happiness. Self-ownership. The individual as an end in him- or herself, not a means to the ends of others, and not the property of family or church or state or society.

Lord Acton observed, “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” This idea is what America was perceived to stand for and embody. The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea—and the idea was liberty.

Observe that the inalienable rights on which this system was based were negative rights in that they were not claims on anyone else’s energy or production. In effect, they merely proclaimed “Hands off.” They made no demands on others except to abstain from coercion. I may not impose my wishes or ideas on you by force, and you may not impose yours on me. Human dealings are to be voluntary. We are to deal with one another by means of persuasion.

In the arena of political economy, the name given to this system in its purest, most consistent form was laissez-faire capitalism. But this is merely a synonym for freedom. Capitalism is what happens when freedom of choice and action is recognized and protected by a government.

In the nineteenth-century United States of America, with the development of a free-market society, people saw the sudden release of productive energy that had previously had no outlet. They saw life made possible for countless millions who had little chance for survival in pre-capitalist economies. They saw mortality rates fall and population growth rates explode upward. They saw machines—the machines that many of them had cursed, opposed, and tried to destroy—cut their workday in half while multiplying incalculably the value and reward of their effort. They saw themselves lifted to a standard of living no feudal baron could have conceived. With the rapid development of science, technology, and industry, they saw, for the first time in history, the liberated mind taking control of material existence.

In this country during the nineteenth century, productive activities were predominantly left free of government regulations, controls, and restrictions. True enough, there was always some government intervention into economic activities, and some business people who sought government favors to provide them with advantages against competitors that would have been impossible in a totally free market. (Business people have often been anything but enthusiasts for true laissez-faire.) And there were other injustices reflecting inconsistency in protecting individual rights: the toleration of slavery (until the Civil War) and legal discrimination against women. But in the brief period of a century and a half, the United States created a level of freedom, of progress, of achievement, of wealth, and of physical comfort unmatched and unequaled by the total sum of mankind’s development up to that time.

To the extent that various other countries adopted capitalism, the rule of brute force vanished from people’s lives. Capitalism abolished slavery and serfdom in all the civilized nations. “Western technology made slavery unnecessary; Western ideas made it intolerable,” observes historian Bernard Lewis [1]. Trade, not violence, became the ruling principle of human relationships. Intellectual and economic freedom rose and flourished together.

A system in which wealth and position were inherited or acquired by physical conquest or political favor was replaced by one in which rewards had to be earned by productive work. By closing the doors to force, capitalism threw them open to achievement. Rewards were tied to production, not to extortion; to ability, not to brutality; to the capacity for furthering life, not to that for inflicting death. For the first time in history, intelligence and enterprise had a broad social outlet—they had a market.

Much has been written about the harsh conditions of life during the early years of capitalism. When one considers the level of material existence from which capitalism raised people and the comparatively meager amount of wealth in the world when the Industrial Revolution began, what is startling is not the slowness with which capitalism liberated men and women from poverty, but the speed with which it did so [2]. Once individuals were free to act, ingenuity and inventiveness proceeded to raise the standard of living to heights that a century earlier would have been judged fantastic.

But there was a price. A free society does not imagine that it can abolish all risk and uncertainty from human existence. It provides a context in which men and women can act, but it does not and cannot guarantee the results of any individual’s efforts. What it asks of people is self-responsibility.

The desire for security is entirely reasonable if it is understood to mean the security achieved through the legal protection of one’s rights and through one’s own savings, long-range planning, and the like. But life is an intrinsically risky business, and uncertainty is inherent in our existence. No security can ever be absolute.

This is accepted more readily if you have a decent level of self-esteem—that is, if you have fundamental confidence in your ability to cope with life’s challenges. But to the extent that self-esteem is lacking, then the self-responsibility that a free society requires can be terrifying. Instead, we may long for a guaranteed, Garden of Eden existence in which all our needs are met by others.

We can observe this attitude in the two main camps that opposed a free-market society in the nineteenth century: the medievalists and the socialists. Longing for some version of a resurrected feudal order, the medievalists dreamed of abolishing the Industrial Revolution. They found spiritually repugnant the disintegration of feudal aristocracy, the sudden appearance of fortune makers from backgrounds of poverty and obscurity, the emphasis on merit and productive ability, and above all the pursuit of profit. They longed for a return to a status society. “Commerce or business of any kind,” wrote John Ruskin, “may be the invention of the devil.” The socialists wished not to abolish the Industrial Revolution but to take it over—to retain the effects, material prosperity, while eliminating the cause, political and economic freedom. They cursed the “cold impersonality” of the marketplace and the “cruelty” of the law of supply and demand, and above all they cursed the pursuit of profit. They proposed to substitute the benevolence of a commissar.

In the writings of both, one can distinguish the longing for a society in which everyone’s existence is automatically guaranteed—that is, in which no one bears responsibility for his or her existence and well-being. Both camps characterized their ideal society by freedom from rapid change or challenge, or from the exacting demands of competition. It was a society in which each must do his or her prescribed part to contribute to the well-being of the whole, but in which no one faced the necessity of making choices that crucially affected his or her life and future. It was a society in which the question of what you earned or did not earn did not come up, in which rewards were not related to achievement, and in which someone’s benevolence assured that you never had to bear responsibility for the consequences of your errors. The sin of capitalism, in the eyes of its critics, was that it did not deliver this protection.

While capitalism offered spectacular improvements in the standard of living and undreamed-of opportunities for the ambitious and adventuresome, it did not offer relief from self-responsibility. It counted on it. It was a system geared to individuals who trusted themselves—trusted their minds and judgment—and who believed that the pursuit of achievement and happiness was their birthright. It was a system geared to self-esteem.

In the earlier years of our history, when people spoke of rights they meant either the natural rights described above or their derivatives, as spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Or they meant contractually acquired rights, such as the right to take possession of a piece of property you have purchased. In the first two instances, the primary focus was on protecting the individual citizen against the government. Insofar as these rights pertained to relationships in the private sector, the sole obligation of people was to abstain from using force or fraud in their interactions with others. In the case of contractually acquired rights, the sole obligation was to honor your agreements and commitments. No great drain on the public treasury was required to secure such rights—nothing remotely approaching a third or half of one’s income. The cost of a government performing this function was marginal. But in the twentieth century, a new notion of rights became fashionable that negated the earlier ones.

Ironically, it was the very success of the American system that made this development possible. As our society became wealthier, it began to be argued that people were “entitled” to all sorts of things that would have been unthinkable earlier. Eighty years ago, few would have suggested that everyone had a “right” to “adequate housing” or “the best available health care.” It was understood that housing and health care were economic goods and, like all economic goods, had to be produced by someone. They were not free gifts of nature and did not exist in unlimited supply. Now, however, at the sight of our growing prosperity, intellectuals and politicians credited not freedom but the government with the new wealth. And they began to declare that government could do more than merely guarantee the protection of rights and establish a more or less level playing field, which was the original American idea but which now seemed too modest a goal. Government could become an agency for achieving any social goal thought to be desirable. In the growing enthusiasm for government regulation, planning, and expanded “services,” especially since the nineteen-thirties, it was not a long step from “it would be desirable” to “people are entitled.” Desires thus became rights.

For example if a man wanted to be a farmer, then under the philosophy of Roosevelt’s New Deal the fact that his farm could not support itself need not be an impediment: Agricultural subsidies could make his desire attainable. Of course, to correct the “mistakes” of free-market capitalism, political coercion became necessary. For wealth to be “redistributed,” first it must be created and then it must be expropriated. Citizens’ taxes paid the farm subsidies. These subsidies had the effect of driving up the cost of farm products, for which again citizens paid. Their rights were expendable. Whenever artificial “rights” are enforced by a government, genuine rights inevitably are sacrificed.

To quote novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand in her essay on “Man’s Rights” in “The Virtue of Selfishness:”

Observe … the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work … it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.
The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it, and dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.

The right of free speech means that a man has the right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that others must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or a printing press through which to express his ideas.

Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

Under pure capitalism—that is, a system based on the inviolability of individual rights—a farm that could not maintain itself in a free market could not remain in existence. Under an increasingly “mixed economy,” the impossible became possible by transferring to others the burden of one’s failures, which the government alone had the power to enforce. This particular program was introduced by a Democrat, but for a very long time it was hard to find a Republican politician—notwithstanding all the free-enterprise rhetoric—who would dare challenge the sacred cow of farm subsidies (or some other form of financial aid), since so many of these farmers are Republicans. As this is being written (February 1995) our agricultural policy is at last being called into question by some members of the new Republican majority, but the outcome cannot yet be predicted. Chances of a radical change seem unlikely.

This is not an essay on political economy, and I shall not attempt to retrace the steps by which this country moved from something close to laissez-faire to the extravagantly regulated system we have today. Nor will I attempt to address the many issues that would be essential if I were to attempt to argue for the libertarian vision of the good society. The defining principle of libertarianism is the abolition of the initiation of physical coercion from human relationships. (I say “initiation” because of course force may be justified in self-defense.) Libertarians advocate freedom of production and trade, freedom (to quote Robert Nozick) of capitalist acts between consenting adults. And on this subject, there is ample evidence—available to anyone who is willing to do the homework—that, apart from any question of its morality, government regulation of our economic activities does not work. As Peter Drucker observes in “The New Realities,” “The Chicago economist George J. Stigler (winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Economics) has shown in years of painstaking research that not one of the regulations through which the U.S. government has tried over the years to control, direct, or regulate the economy has succeeded. They were either ineffectual or they produced the opposite of the intended results.” There are reasons for this, among them that the immoral is not practical, but that is outside the scope of this discussion. Here, we want to focus not on the mixed economy, but on the role the government has played in undermining respect for self-responsibility in our society—and in creating a nation of dependents who can no longer imagine a life without government support, involvement, and regulation.

Under a mixed economy, government intervention can take many forms, from restricting the freedom of producers in the name of protecting consumers, to granting some business group monopolistic powers that shield it from competitors, to special subsidies given to a privileged sector claiming to have unique needs, to the welfare programs that have been sweeping the country since the sixties in a protracted assault on the practice of self-responsibility in the name of compassion. But the essential pattern is always the same: the violation of the rights of some (or all) individuals in the name of allegedly serving the interests of a particular group.

I say “allegedly” because the welfare programs were intended to solve problems that have gotten steadily worse since the legislation was enacted. This is made devastatingly clear in such powerful critiques of our welfare system as Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground.”

The world of government operates very differently from the world of business. In business, when millions of dollars are poured into a project that does not deliver on any of the promises of its advocates, the project is typically dropped and the judgment of its advocates is reassessed. Not having unlimited resources, business is obliged to pay attention to outcome. Failure is a signal to go back to the drawing board. In the world of welfare, entitlement programs, and “social engineering” overseen by bureaucrats with the business acumen of social workers, outcome is less important than intentions.

Never mind that crime is a national forest fire raging out of control and that actual crime statistics are demonstrably higher than official government figures [3]. Never mind that the underclass is expanding, not diminishing. Never mind that the most important economic gains made by African Americans all took place before President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, that many black leaders are now saying that the situation has worsened since, that government policies and programs have encouraged millions of people to think of themselves as helpless children for whom dependence on the state is a necessity. Never mind that our “humanitarian” tax laws and welfare system play a major role in the breakup of black families by financially penalizing a family that remains intact and rewarding one in which the husband departs. (The absence of a male figure in the household has been tied to young people’s disposition to crime, teenage pregnancy, and drug addiction.) Never mind that the people the programs are designed to help are falling farther and farther behind. Never mind that our welfare/entitlement programs have created a nation of dependents and are threatening to bankrupt us. If our motive is compassion for the unfortunate, it seems we do not have to be concerned with whose rights are sacrificed to pay for it nor what kind of personal and social outcomes we produce.

The message of our welfare system is that we are not responsible for our lives and well-being. The message of our legal system is that we are not responsible for our actions. (Has getting away with murder ever been easier in a civilized society?) The message of our political leaders throughout most of this century is that if they are elected, ways can always be found to transfer the burden of our needs and our mistakes to someone else.

With regard to this last, it is the essence of a mixed economy. Such a system means government by pressure groups, a state of affairs in which various gangs (“special interests”) compete for control of the machinery of government to win legislation providing them with the particular favors or protections they seek, always justified, needless to say, by ritualistic references to “the common good.” The Founding Fathers were keenly aware of this danger. In the “Federalist Papers,” No. 10, James Madison warned of the threat represented by special-interest groups when democracies are not limited by individual rights. Special-interest groups prevail, he cautioned, because the benefits they receive from the government are concentrated, while the costs they impose on the taxpayers are diffuse.

Our government has poured into regulatory agencies, welfare programs, and every imaginable kind of statist intervention into the lives of citizens trillions of dollars that in private hands could have been put to productive use. What we have to show for it is a society characterized by:

• Increasing polarization between every kind of social faction
• Massive, inarticulate rage and suspiciousness of anyone who does not share our opinions
• Widespread cynicism
• Escalating violence and crime of unprecedented magnitude
• Escalating conflict between the young and the elderly (provoked by our social security program among other things)
• Increasing conflict among various ethnic groups
• An underclass that keeps growing and growing, nurtured by intellectuals who advocate more of the poison that is killing them—the politics of victimology and entitlement
• A general deterioration in the quality of life

Government is not the sole cause of these problems, although its contribution has been enormous. A fact avoided by our political world is that all the social evils government intervention was supposed to ameliorate have grown steadily worse in direct proportion to the degree of the intervention.

Am I suggesting that no social group has improved its circumstances over the past half-dozen decades? Of course not. What I am saying is that government efforts were not responsible, despite the self-congratulatory propaganda to the contrary.

During the eighties, for example, women enjoyed historically unprecedented gains in wages, in entry into such traditionally male professions as business, law, and medicine, and in education. According to studies by three women economists reported in the New York “Time”s by business writer Sylvia Nasar, in that one decade women made almost as much progress as in the preceding ninety years. Ms. Nasar writes: “Far from losing ground, women gained more in the 1980s than in the entire postwar era before that. And almost as much as between 1890 and 1980.” This was principally due to economic forces that drew more and more women into the marketplace, and also to shifts in our values regarding women’s role in the world. In other words, these gains were in the voluntary domain, not the coercive (political) domain.

West Indian blacks in the United States, who come from a background of intact families, respect for hard work, and an ethic of self-responsibility, have not typically looked to the government for special forms of political protection and favoritism. They take any work available, often beginning on the lowest levels, just to get started in the economy; they may begin on low levels, but they do not remain there. They rise as fast or faster than many whites. “Second-generation West Indians have higher incomes than whites,” reports economist Thomas Sowell in his illuminating study, “Ethnic America.” Furthermore, he writes, “As of 1969 … [w]hile native blacks had an unemployment rate above the national average, West Indian blacks had an unemployment rate beneath the national average.” They are a walking refutation of standard explanations of poverty among blacks primarily in terms of racial discrimination. They sometimes look with quiet scorn on those African Americans for whom their victimhood, helplessness, and necessary dependency are axioms, and who regard low-paying, menial jobs as beneath their dignity but do not regard welfare as beneath it. (It should also be said that there are many African Americans who share the West Indian perspective.) Both groups are black, but the difference in how far and how fast they rise is an issue of differences in their culture and values. A mind-set of self-responsibility is not a peripheral but a central issue here.

In the same book quoted above, Sowell describes the striking social and economic gains that native African Americans have made during this century, which have far more to do with individual initiative than with any government assistance. Then he goes on to observe:

Along with general progress, blacks have experienced retrogression in particular areas. The proportion of one-parent, female-headed black families increased from 18 percent in 1950 to 33 percent in 1973—from double the white percentage in 1950 to more than triple the white percentage in 1973. Despite attempts to depict this as a “legacy of slavery,” one-parent, female-headed black families were a rare phenomenon in earlier times, even under slavery. The proportion of blacks on welfare also rose during the 1960s and 1970s, as the proportion in poverty declined. The proportion of the black population that is working has been declining both absolutely and relative to whites. Unemployment among blacks has risen, also absolutely and relative to whites. Black teenage unemployment in 1978 was more than five times what it had been their years earlier. Among the factors responsible, a number of government programs notably the minimum wage laws—have made it more difficult for blacks to find jobs, and other government programs notably welfare have made it less necessary.

I am aware that the social issues I touch on in this section are complex, many-faceted, and difficult to address briefly. I am also aware that my particular perspective is radical. It does not challenge “welfare as we know it” (almost everyone agrees our present system is a mess). It does not advocate reform. It challenges the underlying principle of welfare itself. By this I mean the doctrine that some people have an unearned claim on the mind, energy, and effort of others who have no choice in the matter. This doctrine treats people not as ends in themselves but as means to the ends of others, and asserts the moral right to do so.

No, I am not advocating the termination of all welfare programs overnight. They need to be phased out over time and with other political corrections to minimize the stress of transition to a truly free society. That, at any rate, is what I would be arguing were this a book about political philosophy rather than a book about self-responsibility.

Here, I can only hint at the libertarian perspective, with no time or space to clarify and amplify it, let alone answer the dozens of challenging questions that a reasonable person could be expected to raise. My purpose in doing so is to drive home the idea that whatever merits we ascribe to our present system, we cannot maintain that that system supports independence or self-reliance. Many of us have talked to young, unwed mothers (white and black) whose attitude is “Why shouldn’t I have another child? The government will take care of us.” We have talked to men and women (white and black) who say “Why should I struggle to get a job when I can get a government check?” Who taught them to think this way [4]?

As to those who are genuinely in trouble and not merely cashing in on the philosophy of entitlement, do I believe it a proper human goal to alleviate suffering and offer a helping hand? Of course. How can one not? There are, however, many things I am in favor of that I do not see as proper functions of a government. Charity is one of them. The question is not whether one believes in benevolence and mutual aid. The question is whether one thinks’ in terms of voluntary choice or governmental coercion. Kindness is a virtue, to be sure. But it is not grounds for sacrificing individual rights. Nothing is. And it is one of the many intellectual ironies and disgraces of our age that those who protest coercion are called “cruel” and “reactionary” while those who embrace it are called “compassionate” and “progressive.”

There is nothing compassionate or progressive about imposing one’s values on others at the point of a gun. And that, ultimately, is what we are talking about, however it is rationalized and dressed up to sound “liberal” and “enlightened.”

The ideal of self-responsibility in no way forbids us to help one another, within limits, in times of need. As noted earlier, Americans have a long tradition of doing this. We are the most charitable people in the world. This is not a contradiction but a natural result of the fact that ours is the first and still the only country in history to proclaim the right to selfishness in “the pursuit of happiness.” The happiness the Declaration of Independence refers to is our own. In proclaiming and defending our right to pursue our own self-interest, to live for our own sake, the American system released the innate generosity in everyone (when they are not treated as objects of sacrifice). It is interesting to observe that during the eighties, the so-called “decade of greed,” Americans gave more than twice the amount to charity that they had given in the previous decade, in spite of changes in the tax laws that made giving less advantageous. Our private, not-for-profit organizations—the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Salvation Army, churches, not-for-profit hospitals, and philanthropic agencies of every conceivable kind—perform benevolent work far more extensive than in any other country. In Europe, if such services exist, they are part of the political, coercive apparatus rather than the private, voluntary realm. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831 that our voluntary spirit is what makes us different from Europeans. Americans have a long and impressive record of developing private and noncoercive solutions to social needs, and we must cultivate and build on this tradition [5].

What needs to be challenged in our country today is not the desirability of helping people in difficulty (intelligently and without self-sacrifice), but rather the belief that it is permissible to abrogate individual rights to achieve our social goals. We must stop looking for some new use of force every time we encounter something that upsets us or arouses our pity.

As a first step toward a freer society, by stimulating new thinking about the best ways to solve social problems, here is one concrete suggestion. Let us bring the paying-attention-to-outcomes philosophy of the business world to our legislative practices. First, every piece of legislation and every government agency must spell out what it aims to accomplish and in what time frame. Next, it must be monitored periodically, and the public must be informed concerning its progress, or lack of progress, toward its goal. When the time set for the accomplishment of specific goals is up, the legislation or agency must go on trial for its life just as in business. It must not be allowed to remain in force merely because it exists. It must demonstrate results, and if it has failed in what it promised to deliver, it should be abolished. This policy alone will not lead us to a fully free society, and you do not have to be an unreserved advocate of laissez-faire to appreciate its merits. What it will do is raise public consciousness concerning the workings of our present system and perhaps introduce some element of accountability. As matters stand now, once a political institution is in place, it is notoriously difficult to get rid of, even when almost everyone agrees it is a disaster.

We heard a great deal about the need for “a greater sense of community.” Government by pressure group inevitably polarizes; it is the antagonist of community. When people are fighting one another for the privilege of imposing their particular agenda by law, is it surprising that their stance to others is adversarial? Government by pressure group places farmers against city dwellers, the young against the elderly, women against men, the less intelligent against the more intelligent, the subsidized or protected industries against the unsubsidized or unprotected, consumers against producers, and the poor against everyone.

When people are fighting for special legal protection and privilege because “I’m more of a victim than you’ll ever be,” when no one is responsible for anything, and problems are always someone else’s fault, is it reasonable to expect a flourishing of brotherly and sisterly love? Clearly not.

This is why I stress that individualism and self-responsibility are the necessary foundation for true community. If we are free of each other, we can approach each other with goodwill. We do not have to be afraid. We do not have to view each other as potential objects of sacrifice, nor view ourselves as potential meals on someone else’s plate. If we live in a culture that upholds the principle that we are responsible for our actions and the fulfillment of our desires, and if coercion is not an option in the furtherance of our aims, then we have the best possible context for the triumph of community, benevolence, and mutual esteem.

Are there now and will there continue to be severe social problems challenging our resourcefulness, inventiveness, and ingenuity? Yes. Will other people sometimes make value choices we can neither agree with nor admire? Inevitably. That is the nature of life. But a culture of self-responsibility is not the best chance we have to create a decent world. It is the only chance.

There are many reasons why people have difficulty even thinking about the possibility of the kind of society I am projecting. Social metaphysics is one of these reasons. I am propounding an idea totally outside the mainstream of “received wisdom.” There are no famous “authorities” to sanction it. There is no widely esteemed group in our culture with which such an idea is identified. It is certainly not “conservatism.” It has nothing to support it except—I am convinced—objective reality.

Let me give an example that might help to make my perspective clearer. Imagine if since the start of this country we believed that it was a function of government to provide citizens with shoes, since no one could hope to have a decent life without shoes. Now imagine that in the nineteen-nineties a radical (meaning, in this context, consistent) advocate of laissez- faire capitalism were to suggest that shoes should be treated like any other economic good—that is, should be manufactured and sold on the free market without governmental involvement. “Are you crazy?” most people might say. “Do you want to see the poor going around shoeless? Have you no compassion?” And yet in our country people do not walk around shoeless, and the shoe industry has done an admirable job of making shoes available to the general public at reasonable prices. To be sure, there are shoes that sell for under ten dollars and others that sell for over eight hundred dollars, but I do not know that anyone sees this as a great problem requiring government regulation of the shoe industry. However, in my imaginary scenario, it might take a great leap of intellectual independence for a person to grasp how a privatized shoe industry would operate, especially with every influential authority condemning the idea as “barbaric,” “retrogressive,” and “inhumane.”

Today, only a handful of people can grasp how a society based consistently on the principle of individual rights might operate, or to project how men and women voluntarily and on their own initiative might develop means to cope with the unsolved problems of our society. It will be a major step forward when more people are willing and able even to think about such a possibility.

Individualism

The idea of individualism is threaded through this book without explicit discussion. Let me say a few concluding words about it now.
In his challenging book, “In Defense of Elitism,” William A. Henry III makes this observation:

The rest of the world wants to come here because America is better—not just economically better but politically better, intellectually better, culturally better. Ours is a superior culture, and it is so precisely because of its individualism. More than any other world power, in fact, we gave to global consciousness the very idea of the individual as the focal point of social relations—not the king, not the army, not the church, and not the tribe. Just when the world is rushing toward us and our ways, let us not slide toward embracing theirs. [6]

Individualism is an ethical-political concept and also an ethical-psychological one. In the ethical-political sphere, it upholds the principle of individual rights. It insists that a human being is an end in him- or herself, not a means to the ends of others. It rejects the doctrine that we are born to serve others and that self-sacrifice is the ultimate virtue. It regards not self-sacrifice but self-realization and self-fulfillment as the moral goal of life. It celebrates the human person. In the ethical-psychological sphere, it holds that a person should learn to think and judge independently, valuing nothing higher than the sovereignty of his or her own mind, and insists that any other course betrays our well-being and our highest potential. Individualism is not solipsism, and it does not deny the importance of human relationships or how much we learn from each other or the fact that we can realize ourselves only in a social context. It does not stand against community but insists that independence is its proper base. It celebrates autonomy.

Just as a community is best nourished by the individualism of its members, so individualism requires the foundation of self-responsibility. It cannot exist without it.

If we understand this, we understand the inappropriateness of attacking individualism by equating it with “doing whatever one likes.” To do whatever I “like,” regardless of reality, context, or the rights of others, and therefore regardless of my promises and commitments, is sometimes to use others as means to my ends and thereby to violate the very essence of individualism. An individualist lives by his or her own thought and effort, neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self. An individualist deals with others through the exchange of values (material or spiritual). This is what independence means in human relationships.

The notion of an “individualist” who respects no one’s rights but his own is a straw man. If individualism is upheld as a moral principle, then it must be universal, must apply to all human beings. If I claim rights for myself that are inherent in my nature, I cannot deny them to you. If I deny the rights of others, I cannot claim them for myself. No one can claim the moral right to a contradiction.

Allow me a very personal example. When I was twelve or thirteen, I stole some money from the cash register in my father’s clothing store. Everyone in the family was dumfounded and no one quite knew what to say to me. The exception was my oldest sister, Florence, who was wise enough to know the words that could reach me. She knew that I already prized independence as a cardinal value. She took me aside and said, “Apart from the fact that you had no right to take money that didn’t belong to you, stealing contradicts everything you say you admire. You talk about independence, but no one can be independent who takes what belongs to someone else. Doing so ties you to others in the worst way. Stealing is dependency. A truly independent person respects the rights of others, no matter what.” That conversation happened over fifty years ago, and I am still grateful for it. It was one of the most important things anyone ever said to me.

Now let me share another story, this time about a corporate client of mine, to dispel another confusion about individualism. I was working with a brilliant founder-owner of a small but rapidly growing business who had difficulty understanding the idea of “teamwork” as it applied to him, although he had no trouble understanding how it applied to others in his organization. His staff complained that he often held himself aloof, failed to share information about his activities that would make their own work more meaningful and productive, and generally tended to operate like “the Lone Ranger,” sometimes leaving chaos behind him. We discussed the need for a better flow of information between him and his people, and the need to break down the wall that was felt between him and them. He looked at me sheepishly and said, “I know you’re right. I know it—in my head. But … all my life I’ve been this somewhat alienated character. You know what I mean. My people are right: I do see myself as the Lone Ranger. And boy! it’s hard to let go of that.”

I was silent for a moment, not certain how best to proceed, and then I remembered that the sport he most enjoyed watching was hockey. “Hockey is an interesting sport,” I began—and he immediately responded, “Yeah, it sure is, I love it!” I went on, “Well, the thing about hockey players is, each one of them’s a real individualist—they’re anything but a bunch of conformists!—and yet, out on the rink when they’re playing, they all absolutely count on each other, they have to be able to count on each other, and the more perfectly in sync they are, the more in tune with each other, the more powerful they are as a team. I mean, nobody does ‘his own thing’ regardless of what’s going on around him. He does what the situation requires, right?”

He grinned and stared up at the ceiling, and I felt I could see the brain cells in his head whirling around purposefully. Then he replied, “Now that gives me something to think about, something that makes sense. Yeah, if I look at it that way … that’s a kind of team player I can be. I can live with that.” He reflected a moment longer, than repeated, “Yes. I can do that.” Then he chuckled, “Hockey. Pretty good.”

One last point: Individualism does not deny that we have responsibilities toward others, but it defines them differently from the way collectivism does. Individualism teaches that a person has the right to exist for his or her own sake. It views help to others as benevolence, not as duty, and as a choice, not a mortgage on our life that one was born with. Collectivism asserts that the individual exists to serve others. Collectivism rejects the entire notion of individual rights. It treats not the individual but the collective, the group, the tribe, as the primary moral unit to which the individual is subordinate, as we have seen in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Red China, and other countries ruled by some variant of this ideology. Individualism holds that the primary responsibility one has toward others is to respect their rights and freedom, not to initiate force or fraud against them. Beyond that, we have the obligation to honor those agreements and commitments into which we have voluntarily entered. Finally, we must not be willing participants in a slave society.

But beyond that, are we our brother’s keeper? Are we to justify our existence by the service we render others? Are we the property of whoever may be in need? As we have already seen, individualism answers no: Such bondage is incompatible with the principle that each person is an end in him- or herself and does not belong to others—the principle of self-ownership. This principle, to the extent that it has been implemented, is the crowning social innovation of Western civilization, the bedrock of political freedom.

The ironic thing about the ideas of individualism and self-responsibility is that everyone understands them properly and practices them appropriately some of the time. The question is, Can we learn to live them consistently?

Our answer to that question will determine the kind of world we create in the twenty-first century.

Notes

[1] “Eurocentrism Revisited,” Commentary, December 1994.
[2] For example, with respect to the impact of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism in England, a 1983 study by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson found that the real wages of English blue-collar workers doubled between 1819 and 1851.
[3] For details, see “Criminal Justice?” by Bob Bidinotto.
[4] For an important part of the answer, see “The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass,” by Myron Magnet. In this remarkable work of social analysis, the author presents evidence that the rebellion of the sixties against an ethic of hard work, self-discipline, and deferred gratification—in the name of “I want it now and without effort!”—generated a shift of values that was internalized by the underclass more than by any other group, with tragic, demoralizing results. Government social policy was not the cause of this culture shift but an expression of it.
[5] For an interesting discussion of the growing importance of this “third sector” in the American economy—that is, the not-for-profit institutions aimed at addressing a variety of human needs, and doing so far more effectively than any government—see Peter Drucker’s “The New Realities.” For discussion of why charitable and philanthropic activities expanded so much during the 1980s (and why they may drop again under the Clinton presidency), see Charles Murray’s essay “Little Platoons” in the anthology “Good Order,” edited by Brad Miner.
[6] Perhaps it is of some interest to mention that this Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic for “Time” magazine, and extraordinarily astute social observer was (he is deceased) not a libertarian but “a registered Democrat, and a card-carrying member of the ACLU.”