Responsibility assumption

Responsibility assumption is a doctrine in the spirituality and personal growth fields holding that each individual has substantial or total responsibility for the events and circumstances that befall them in their life. While there is little notable about the notion that each person has at least some role in shaping their experience, the doctrine of responsibility assumption posits that the individual's mental contribution to his or her own experience is substantially greater than is normally thought. "I must have wanted this" is the type of catchphrase used by adherents of this doctrine when encountering situations, pleasant or unpleasant, to remind them that their own desires and choices led to the present outcome.

Variations in degree of personal responsibility postulated

The main variable within various interpretations of the responsibility assumption doctrine is the degree to which the individual is considered to be the cause of his or her own experience, ranging from partial but substantial, to total.

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Partial but substantial responsibility

In its forms positing less than total responsibility, the doctrine appears in nearly all motivational programs, some psychotherapy, and large group awareness training programs. In programs as non-controversial as the Dale Carnegie books and courses or Norman Vincent Peale's books on the power of positive thinking, it functions as a mechanism to point out that each individual does affect the perceived world by the decisions they make each day and by the choices they made in the past. These less absolute forms may be expressed within the rubric that we cannot control the situations that befall us, but we can at least control our attitudes toward them.

Related Topics:
Psychotherapy - Large group awareness training - Dale Carnegie - Norman Vincent Peale's - Choices

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Total responsibility

In its more absolute form, the doctrine becomes both more pronounced and more controversial. Perhaps the most prominent dividing line of controversy is the threshold of reversed mental causation, where sufficient responsibility is assigned to the individual that their thoughts or mental attitudes are considered the actual cause of external situations or physical occurrences rather than vice-versa, along the lines of the catchphrase, "mind over matter." In this realm the doctrine can present controversial propositions such as, "you chose to have cancer and can just as easily become well if you choose," or the even more shocking and initially unpalatable proposition, "the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust did so because they wanted to die." Despite the extremity of these positions, there are indeed groups and schools of thought subscribing to the doctrine of responsibility assumption that would support these propositions and more. They point to offsetting benefits if such a causation system is true, such as the absence of personal sacrifice and interpersonal guilt, or the absolute safety such a system portends for the causative mind. In its absolute form, this doctrine approaches solipsism (the notion that only oneself exists), and strictly from this perspective causation may, perhaps, correctly be termed solipsistic.

Related Topics:
Causation - Mind over matter - Cancer - Become well - Jew - Holocaust - Sacrifice - Guilt - Solipsism

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