You Made This Shit Happen
The offensive principle of Radical Responsibility
Don’t read this if have active, unprocessed trauma. It won’t be useful to you and you might find it upsetting. You have to be in a certain place in your life for these words to land as intended. If you’re okay with taking full responsibility for your reading experience, read on.
Radical responsibility is the idea that you are responsible for literally everything that happens to you. Someone cuts you up in traffic? You did this. Someone offers you a life-changing sum of money out of the blue? You also did this. You’re on a festival site, you need a can opener, no one has one, you give up, and later that day, you go to see improv comedy, get roped in, and as part of the scene, one of the actors gives you a present to unwrap and bizarrely, it is a can opener. Yep. Great work, that was you.
I’m sure I hardly need to tell you about the standard interpretation.
Things happen to us.
The guy who cuts you up in traffic is an arsehole. Or, if you are feeling generous, he is late to pick up his kids from school, but it is still him, not you. The lump sum out of nowhere? That’s a rare piece of luck. That weird thing about the can opener? Coincidence. Or, if you’re the mandala-loving chakra-clearing type, synchronicity. But it wasn’t down to you. Seriously, how would that even be possible?
Arseholes, luck and coincidence. Conventional thinking says these are the factors that shape our lives. Sure, some things we cause, but we are prey to random events. Many things that affect us profoundly, we have no say in. Good people get cancer and die young. “Bad people” do what the hell they like and get away with it. All we can do is casually adopt the Buddhist concept of karma and hope they’ll get their just desserts. (By which we do not mean cheesecake, but some undisclosed punishment).
The problem with all this is that we’re interminable victims. And the more complex life has become (especially when so many of us live urban and internet-connected lives), the more powerless we feel. A pervasive sense of powerlessness contributes significantly to both the ongoing mental health crisis and the desire to reclaim power by lashing out at each other online (which in turn exacerbates the ongoing mental health crisis). Lashing out happens on an individual level, but also frequently at a “group” level, mischaracterizing and blaming people we disagree with (“feminists”, “bigots”, “Wokists”, “Marxists”, “the far right”) for things which we perceive as social ills. A sense of powerlessness also contributes to voter apathy and the retreat into self-soothing behaviours like the bingeing of box sets or alcohol. What can you do when you can do nothing about the state of the world/your life/that guy? Get drunk and watch Bridgerton.
Radical responsibility, as a concept, is “offensive” in more ways than one. Yes, it seems incredibly offensive to say that someone is responsible for all the bad things that happen to them. The good things, okay, that we can maybe accept, but the bad things? These can range from tripping up on the pavement, to being caught up in a six-hour tailback that forced you to pee into a bottle, to developing some horrific terminal illness. Or the worst example you can think of, involving the suffering or death of innocents: children, in particular. Even if we weren’t in an era where people are especially prone to taking offense, that is going to feel offensive. How can someone be held responsible for being the victim of (for example) sexual assault?
“Be held responsible” – yes, that’s a bloody nightmare, and it’s a wrongun. And has been happening to women for millennia, of course, from being blamed for what we were wearing or drinking to those cultures who hold women guilty of sexual misconduct for being raped.
But this is not about victim blaming. Radical responsibility is a very different fish. It is about choosing to hold yourself responsible. It’s a purely you-and-you thing. And it’s offensive in a completely different way: offensive as opposed to defensive. It’s a power move. It puts you in the driver’s seat. No longer are you a victim of random circumstances. Suddenly you have agency, as all good protagonists do. You accept responsibility for every aspect of your life, and by doing so, dissolve the wounds of victimhood.
Naturally, this is a choice. It is a shift in thinking that requires you to consider the purpose of your life as a whole. If up until now you have wondered if there is indeed any overarching purpose to your life (the standard atheist and agnostic position) this will require something of a U-turn, and you may have to play the What If game. If you’re a nihilistic hardliner, this is likely to be beyond your limits, but if you can soften up your beliefs to allow the possibility that you could be wrong about a few things, you may find it rather freeing.
The specific What If game required here is as follows.
What if my life is meaningful? What if I am here to grow as a human being? What if everything that happens to me, even the things that seem “bad”, are things I have, on a subconscious level, worked out will be good for me? What if everything is actually something that has been (subconsciously) arranged, by me, to help me grow?
Now the wider and the more detached from our conscious selves we can consider that ‘arranging’ taking place, the better. Especially when we are talking about serious, upsetting and/or violent things. One may need to be open to the idea that we, on some level, are tuned into non-local consciousness; that our subconscious selves have access to the thoughts of other subconscious selves and thus we unknowingly co-create those tiny decisions (delay getting on the road by five minutes, take this route instead of that one) which create the conditions for our rendezvous with horror, or miraculous safety.
I am close to those who have had serious life-changing accidents. Accidents that no sane person would wish on themselves or would hold the victims responsible for. And I would never suggest to these beautiful people “Hey, maybe you did this to yourself, to help you grow as a person.” That would be another level of horrific. But I will say that if you have suffered such a thing and can find a way to work towards that for yourself, to see the growth in the pain you’ve had, you can free yourself from the guilt, anger, and regret that only add to your suffering.
Radical responsibility is not the easiest path available. But for the last few years, I have lived by this principle, and I can tell you it is very freeing. My first instinct is still the habitual blaming of others or circumstances. But my second, more considered response is, “How might I have put myself here to help me grow?”
Some of you know that I am answering a case for defamation right now. Did I make this happen? Yes, I did. I am definitely responsible for the words I wrote. And for being snarky, thinking I was being funny. And for not fact-checking. Is it helping me grow as a person? A painful lesson indeed, but yes. An important return to first principles, and also some training in anxiety management.
Am I responsible for getting into an abusive marriage the first time around? Most surely. It was me who said Yes. It was me who breezed past some red flags. Did it help me grow as a person? More than anything else in my life.
Am I responsible for the family I was born into, the childhood I had? This might be a step too far for some people, but as a lapsed atheist, with a sense of existence beyond this body, I am happy to say yes.
To whatever extent you can adopt it, responsibility for what happens “to” you can truly free you. A sense of empowerment feels a thousand times better than its opposite. And for those looking to contribute to the evolution of a better world, radical responsibility is a vital level in the game.
This week:
I cleared out my Goldsmiths office and said goodbye after 11 years
Found out some scandalous yet not surprising news about the redundancies (which I will be sharing in Sunday’s Secret Diary Club)
A writing project got a boost but I still can’t talk about it!
Over to you
What do you think about radical responsibility?
Do you practice it?
Will you try it?
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Until next week, have a good one.
Taking responsibility for something isn’t necessarily the same as thinking it’s your fault. Maybe your childhood sucked. Maybe it even left you traumatised. You can’t undo what happened and the fallout is a reality you have to live with, at least from a starting position. But what you do about it, how you absorb it and left it affect you as a person, is absolutely under your control. You might need some help to get there, but ultimately if you think of yourself as a victim and that becomes your identity, everybody loses.
I think I'm responsible for my own choices, words, actions, behaviours, responses, feelings etc. And I think other people are responsible for theirs. Taking responsibility for things that others do is a step too far for me, especially when talking about acts of violence or cruelty. I may take responsibility for getting in a car with someone I didn't know well; it was not my choice for him to drug me and rape me. He did that and he is the one who carries the responsibility. Just to give an example. People can be innocent victims. But of course we shouldn't make that our identity or refuse to take responsibility for our healing.