Personal Responsibility is Selfishness

“Personal responsibility” is a phrase I hear all too often. Typically it’s used as a coded phrase for selfishness, a lack of empathy, and ignoring the fact that being part of society requires acknowledging our shared responsibilities towards one another. As I see it, personal responsibility is unpatriotic and un-Christian, at least when taken to the extremes it so commonly is these days.

Now, personal responsibility doesn’t sound so bad on the surface. And it isn’t. Taking responsibility for your own actions and life choices is a necessary part of being an adult human being. Failure to do so often amounts to laziness and immaturity, two traits I know intimately. It’s important I acknowledge that before I go railing against personal responsibility. Personal responsibility isn’t exactly a terrible ideal devoid of any redeeming qualities. Rather, personal responsibility is important. It’s something I often don’t take seriously enough. But it’s also a cheap façade trying to hide dismantling Medicaid and protections for people with pre-existing conditions behind something more palatable. It’s the source informing a lot of misguided and malicious ideas about how society should work and how we should treat one another.

With regards to healthcare, “personal responsibility” seems to mean a complete disregard for others and a focus solely on oneself or one’s family. I’ve been told my own cancer treatment isn’t worth it, that it’s too expensive and unfairly burdens other people. I’ve been chastised online for daring to say that I should be able to have health insurance, since insurance companies covering expensive treatments like what I need for my cancer means other people might have to spend a little more on their own coverage. As if that isn’t the basic principle of how insurance works. Someone just last week told me they find it “hard to even relate” to my fear of losing my life-saving coverage, because they are spending too much on health insurance. As if spending too much money is remotely comparable to losing access to the treatment keeping your chronic cancer managed. I’ve been told I should have planned better, been more responsible, and saved more money before I got cancer. As if anyone can plan for a cancer like mine.

Statements like these just highlight for me how so many people thoroughly fail to understand serious health issues and how unexpectedly they can arise. They make clear how little empathy so many people feel as well, and how content so many people are to disregard those whose life experiences run contrary to their preconceived notions. For me, these kinds of ill-informed to blatantly malevolent statements reveal “personal responsibility” for what it is: a lame excuse to justify selfishly ignoring others.

Such selfishness and disregard for others is far from patriotic. This might not be especially relevant if not for the fact that many of the people who said the things I mention two paragraphs above have “patriot” in their twitter bio or feature the American Flag in their profile picture. I guess some of us have vastly different ideas of what it means to be patriotic. I think it’s patriotic to happily pay a little more in taxes or health insurance if it means our country spends a little more on making society better and covering people who most need medical care. I think it’s more patriotic to want to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of the greater good than it is to post patriotic pictures of flags and bald eagles online and set off fireworks annually. I think it’s patriotic to ask what we can do for our country and our fellow citizens, not what we can do for ourselves. Personal responsibility, as it connotes today, leaves little room for patriotism.

Personal Responsibility is also egregiously un-Christian, which wouldn’t matter to the national conversation if it weren’t so often Christians, often citing their idea of Christian values, who support “personal responsibility” and “personal freedom” as guiding principles for everything from gun regulations to healthcare policy. I can’t find anywhere in Jesus’ teachings that suggest emphasizing personal responsibility as much as we do today. In fact, as I see things, it’s Christian to disregard personal responsibility. Not that Christians are called to be irresponsible, but we are implored not to worry about taking care of ourselves so much and instead focus on serving and caring for others. The Good Samaritan didn’t cross over to the other side of the road to better take care of himself, after all. Neither should we.