The Power of Taking Responsibility

Among the many things discussed in the recent, fantastic video on the Architecture of Belief I mentioned yesterday with Stefan Molyneux and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, were issues of mindset, finding purpose, and the power of taking responsibility.

Now, I’d listened to Colin Flaherty’s podcast “White Girl Bleed a Lot” for quite some time and highly recommend it, though I’ve cut down a lot. No, not because it’s false – he bangs the drum ceaselessly over things people need to hear – it’s just that, barring major newsworthy events, the story is, names and specific details varying, basically, depressingly, the same. Nevertheless, one of his regular guests worked as a prison psychologist, and he would make exactly that point as well. Taking responsibility for your choices and consequences is not only something those in prison avoid like the plague, but it is one of the most freeing things you can do. That the one’s he has seen a change for the better in, it has been because they accepted responsibility.

So my ears perked up when the subject came up, and Stefan pointed out that “once you accept that something, your situation, is your fault, you now have the ability to do something about it.”

On the same topic, Jordan discusses an experiment that he would do with his students, challenging them to take some time each day, and to look around. To find one thing that was not the way that they liked, that they could change for the better. The degree to which this small thing changed the students conception of themselves and their contentment with their own lives was phenomenal, and I can attest to the truth of this as well in my own.

I’ve mentioned before, a dirty secret of this blog is that I am really doing it to spend time every day, working on something, to develop a habit, what Scott Adams would refer to as a system, that I can point to every day and say “I successfully did this.” Crossing over into what Peterson discusses though, the project I chose was one of trying to write things that may help, inform, or entertain people, and not simply to better inform myself or organize my thoughts and beliefs as I commit them to screen. Doing that one, achievable thing, every day, to help fix the problems that I see.

And once you make a habit of one such thing, you can then add the next, small, achievable step, of gradual, kaizen improvement, until one day, you look back, and realize that what you are now and what you believe is very different from what you were.

One other note – a reason I’m in the alt-right is because I have watched people who seek the truth from different walks of life, different conceptual frames, come to similar conclusions. Yes, there are disagreements, but when people as varied as Flaherty, Stefan, Vox, Hoyt, and Eric Raymond, despite their disagreements, also begin to fundamentally agree on a number of things despite the paths taken to get there, and having changed their minds when confronted with reality and evidence, I take notice.

So too here. Taking responsibility, habits and systems, mindset – I’ve seen these in places and approaches as varied as Molyneux, Flaherty, Cernovich, and Adams, and they all begin to overlap, fit in with each other like puzzle pieces.

That is one way to recognize we are likely approaching a truth.