Do you own you? You may live your life on the basis that you are a free agent, that you own your body and that you control your mind. You may assume that, as long as you obey all the laws and treat others properly, you can do what you want. To a large extent this is so, but not entirely.
In an earlier post, I pointed out that it is actually impossible for doctors to keep up with all new discoveries and developments in medicine. Is your doctors’ lack of knowledge their fault? Or is your being at the receiving end of medical ‘error’ an example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Who do you hold responsible for making you happy or successful? Do you blame the government for making life more difficult than you would like it to be? Do you blame your parents for bringing you up too strictly, or not strictly enough?
Who is responsible for your life?
I want to look at some other aspects of responsibility.
In Australia, following on the heels of the trend in the USA, there is a growing perception that if something bad happens to you, someone should be made to pay. There are many consequences of this and not many of them are positive.
In the previous post I talked of a bushfire being a circumstance to which you respond with choices. If your choice was to leave and your house burns down, do you ‘blame’ anyone or anything? Finding your house burnt down on your return is ‘the next experience’ you have moved on to and this ‘next experience’ becomes the current circumstance (symptom) to which you have an opportunity to respond.
If you blame your current circumstances on the choices made by others, what power do you give yourself in your life?
Governments make laws without directly consulting you. Even if you voted for the current government, it may make laws which you don’t like. There is not much you can do to change that, although there may be if you are determined enough. The point is that the laws of the land are circumstances not really of your making. They are the environment in which you live, as the weather is; they are your circumstances. There are a number of things you can do about those circumstances. You can simply lump it and get on with things, with or without complaining. You can shelter from it – from the politics, the law, the weather. You can move to some place with a different (political or climatic) environment. You can find ways of making use of the circumstances.
When you were born, it is very likely that your parents expected that you would live a long, healthy, happy and productive life. But unlike with the purchase of, say, a car, there was no guarantee. Yet, many of us seem to live our lives as if this were not so – we think and often act as if someone else is responsible for our lives not turning out as expected.
As I have said earlier, what we believe dictates how we live our lives. If you have a set of beliefs about someone or about a group of people, your relationships with them is based on those beliefs.
In history classes at school and through reading books, I learned that Australian Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherers; agriculture was unknown in this country until the white settlers arrived in 1788 and, apart from temporary ‘humpies’, the Aborigines did not construct homes.
What are the consequences of patients being fed information about their health by the media, and then consulting doctors who do not have the time to keep up with important developments in medicine? This question and the answers to it are complicated by the quality of the information which each relies on.
What we are led to believe can have long-term consequences. In the lead-up to the 2001 Australian Federal election, we were told that refugees on a boat had thrown their children overboard, in order to force the Government to take them in. This turned out to be false; but that information was withheld until after the election.