People of the 21st century invest a great deal of time in discovering how other people are responsible for their ills. The fixation with “abuse” suffered in childhood among affluent, moderately well-adjusted adults is baffling. In a world that has seen untold years of pillaging, sacrifice, slavery, and oppression—all of which still occur, every day—the obsession with perceived wrongs seems beyond explanation.
There is a reason, though. It seems likely to have something to do with colossally bad ideas that are hard to quit. Social psychology seductively suggests that systems are rigged against you. Your faults are someone else’s fault, the Man is getting you down, and there’s nothing you can do to meaningfully change your circumstances without smashing the patriarchy or upending the current social order. How you propose to disband civil society and refashion it from the ground-up without affecting the supply chains for overpriced lattes is a question that often goes unaddressed.
Once you’ve been fed the idea that you’re off the hook for the wretched mess that is your life, you don’t need the Savior. You have already been rescued from responsibility for the dysfunction into which you were born and the continual disorder to which you contribute throughout life. The trouble with this empty salvation is that you are left sitting in your misery, life unchanged, the promises of the revolution yet to be delivered.
From this unhelpful posture, the world seems a very sad place. The people we elevate with our consumer spending and votes seem arbitrarily to gain power in a rigged system; we fail to see how an influencer is only that because we accept their influence. Every fall from grace in the public arena is met with stunned indignation, a reckoning!
In the private arena, the character flaws of spouses and coworkers become personal assaults. Put together by forces beyond our control, blind to our own shortcomings, we are slaves to circumstances. Many people feel justified in ranting to no end about how horrid a spouse is, an unfortunate pastime, which, as one group therapist noted, says little about the spouses and a lot about the ranters’ poor judge of character. At no point does it occur to people to wonder how we contribute to the “system” and play an active role in determining the course it takes.
The bad ideas about how everything is everyone else fault, well not someone’s fault but more just the big generalized system’s fault—you know the one made up of individual actors with free will. Well, these bad ideas come not from blowhards in the local bar but from the upper echelons of our institutions of learning.
Charlie Munger, billionaire business partner to Warren Buffet, has a passion for this subject and spoke of the phenomenon on several occasions. In her book Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger, Janet Lowe quotes Munger:
You could argue that the very worst of all academic insanity is in the liberal arts departments of the great universities. You can see the reason if you ask the question, ‘What one frame of mind is likely to cause the most damage to an individual’s happiness, his contribution to others, and the like—what one frame of mind will be the worst?’ The answer, of course, would be some sort of paranoid self-pity. I can’t imagine a more destructive frame of mind. Yet whole university departments want everyone to feel like a victim. And you pay money to send your children to these places. And this is what they teach them! It’s amazing how these pockets of irrationality creep into eminent places.
Munger’s antidote to the grievance-seeking inspired by much of modern education is, as Lowe writes, “the iron prescription: every time you think some person, or some unfairness is ruining your life, it is you what are ruining your life.”
You can hear the bleeding-heart liberal, perhaps an overweight divorcee with a menagerie of interesting and emotionally delicate friends, charging for the microphone at the back of the room to strenuously object. It sounds like Munger is suggesting people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps! This unhelpful phrase, which is physically impossible, does seem to capture the essence of what Munger, a very successful man by certain metrics, suggests. It’s a terrible thing taking responsibility for one’s short-comings, pain, and unhappiness. However, in that ownership lies the path to freedom. In Christ, there is a Savior who has already paid the ultimate price for our inadequacy and offense. Absent responsibility and we are left to live in a hell of our own making.
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