----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Jackson" <cqmv at pdx.edu>
But go back to your previous post where you asserted that "people should wake up and take responsibility". Carrol was a bit harsh, but note his point: the rhetoric of personal responsibility depends on the assumption that individuals are autonomous agents that can "take responsibility". N's whole point--and if I construe it correctly, the Buddhist view--is that there is no coherent, unified executor self. If you accept that position, then we can't exhort people to "take responsibility", because there is no coherent self that has this kind of executive control.
I like Wittgenstein here: the language we use is leading us down the rabbit hole. We say "people should take responsibility", and that language, placing the person as the subject, reflects and reinforces the fiction that people have coherent, unified selves that direct their behavior. --And note the ideological ramifications of this linguistic trick: the poor are responsible for their poverty, the rich deserve their wealth, victims of rape and battering must have done something to deserve it, etc.
In sum: the rhetoric of personal responsibility is of a piece with the hyperindividualism of our capitalist society, and it is ideological through and through.
Miles
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Try this argument in court after you've run a red light while talking on a cell phone and kill three people in an intersection with a crosswalk.
Ian