In all the talk about "values," something has fallen into the cracks – the notion of personal responsibility.   If a problem arises, we didn't cause it; someone or something else did.  If a solution needs to be found or a situation needs to be dealt with, it's not our job; someone else will fix it, or it will miraculously fix itself.

We apparently take perverse satisfaction in being victims because victims are never accountable for their own misfortunes.  Similarly, when others are more fortunate or successful than we are, we attribute their good fortune to luck or privilege or something else, never to our own stupidity, lack of effort, or other shortcomings.

In the aftermath of the hurricanes that swept the Gulf region of the U.S., for example, explanations for lack of preparedness and the ensuing chaos consisted mostly of finger-pointing.  Everyone blamed everyone else, including God for bringing down such a catastrophe, and few acknowledged their part – whether it was bureaucratic bungling or individual incompetence and stupidity.

This absence of responsibility is not, however, confined to government organizations and the like; it permeates every level of public and private life.

In an automobile accident, we are never to blame; the other guy always is.  When a marriage breaks up, neither spouse takes responsibility; the other party – or circumstances or bad luck or fate – is.  The unwed mother who lives in poverty is not responsible for her condition (as if she did not participate in the act that made her a mother in the first place).  The man who got her pregnant and then skipped out is not responsible; he is somehow the victim of discrimination, deprivation, or some social malaise over which he has no control.  Our own immorality is not our responsibility; it is thrust upon us by the media, who literally impel us to follow bad examples.

Such evasions are a form of denial – indulgence in rationalization so that we are, conveniently, not responsible for problems and therefore not obligated to seek solutions.  When our children don't learn anything in school, teachers are not responsible; everything from TV to lack of funding to parental indifference is named as a probable cause.  Teachers, in turn, can say that the problem is lack of discipline in the home – for which, of course, they are not responsible.  The kids themselves are not responsible for their failure to perform.  So-called experts have devised an array of "syndromes" to explain why Johnny and Jane are goof-offs.  None of these syndromes include laziness or lack of self-discipline, and suggesting that Johnny's and Jane's poor performance is caused by their irresponsibility is forbidden because saying that would damage their self-esteem.

In the business world, unaccountability has become a fine art.  A company that produces shoddy merchandise is not responsible for doing so; it is just trying to make a profit.  Similarly, a company that has poor or nonexistent customer service is not to be blamed; it cannot be competitive if it wastes money on an intangible that cannot be entered as a credit in the ledger books.  Workers who do not care about the quality of the work or the kind of service they offer are not to blame because they are not paid enough (so they think) to care about much more than showing up for work.  Just being there is the extent of their responsibility, and sometimes it doesn't extend that far.  Hardly any business meeting or project starts on time because nowadays few people are responsible enough to be punctual.

We are a society of rationalizers.  Not only do we have an excuse for every error, every instance of neglect, and every kind of inappropriate behavior; we also believe these excuses ourselves.  Armies of psychologists are ready to arm us with convenient reasons for our reactions to situations – reasons that do everything but make us accountable for our actions.  The buck stops on the therapist's couch, and we walk away, feeling justified to continue with lives of blissful irresponsibility.  We suffered some childhood trauma, we have a mild psychosis that prevents us from taking ownership of obligations, we are fearful of the risk associated with responsibility because we failed a spelling test in first grade, and so on.  Psychotherapy can help us to find excuses when we are not creative enough to invent them ourselves.

A consequence of all this irresponsibility is an erosion of the social contract.  We no longer recognize that we are interdependent beings and that our dependence on one another requires that we be responsible to one another.  Instead, we have become isolated egos, pursuing private paths to self-gratification, regardless of the public consequences.

Perhaps this was always true.  Perhaps, in the distant past, when we had to beat other cavemen over the head to survive, it was even more true.  Ironically, however, when the increasing complexity of life has made us more interconnected than ever, we have, instead of accepting our responsibility, made a full-time job of shirking it.

In the prescient and immortal words of Pogo Possum, "We have met the enemy, and they is us."