While diving through Rollo's archives I was struck by a particular passage. In The Wrong Girl Rollo states:
“Extreme Ownership” is a lot like the “just be yourself” non-response people will give you when they don’t know what to tell you about your lack of Game. It sounds like wisdom, but it’s really based on the presumption of knowing a guy must always find fault in himself before any other consideration.
The thrust of the article is that contrary to what society often tells us not everything is a man's own fault. Many evils he faces are outside his control and the results are not exclusively up to him.
It is a good article and I encourage you to read it but in this article I will follow the same idea down a different rabbit trail.
We are in the tail-end of a time when justice is a cultural assumption. Things aren't perfect, the idea goes, but in general there is justice. Things are the way they are for a reason and this is America after all. Why, there is a moral fabric underpinning the universe. Who'd be disturbed enough to entertain the other possibility?
As a result if something is wrong in a man's life there is an unstated frame that it on some level is his fault. Sweat, grit, and bootstraps will earn you anything so if something is wrong with you, well, something is wrong with you.
With introspection and life experience most people will recognize this as a lie. Even if it is true in general it surely does not apply to each situation. For all that we imagine ourselves standing astride the Earth we are as individuals weak, flawed, and getting no younger. Any number of events or tragedies can conspire against us. Some we can surmount and some we cannot.
All right then, many will think, it may well not be your fault. You are still responsible for your success and happiness. Even if you aren't at fault you can still do something. Get yourself up, man. Dust yourself off and make the most of it. It's your responsibility.
Sometimes there is just nothing to be done. Making the most of it may mean making very little indeed. We are not atomic actors striking out on our own; sometimes we're merely pinballs flying through a machine, desperately holding on to nothing as we are subjected to abrupt violence beyond our understanding or control.
As adult men formed in the Western milieu it is in both our training and our nature to take responsibility. This is good on the species level; if men did not take responsibility who would? When things do not fit together we pour ourselves into the gap and make it whole. We can however accomplish only so much and be spread only so thin while evil and decay are without such limits. Sometimes we are not equal to the task. We can stretch a little more -- until we can't. We can give a little more -- until there is no more left. The point of failure is so often internal rather than external that we confuse it as not real. It may not be made of atoms or measurable in a laboratory but it is real.
People -- especially ourselves -- say that we must take responsibility. We must square the circle, fill the gap, and make what was broken whole. Are we not men? The expectation that we can do a thing and the thing must be done suggests if only subconsciously that there is a duty to do it.
This is another cruel burden. Perhaps the evils that visit us do not prove we are at fault, but surely we have a duty! If you cannot do your duty than what sort of man are you? So perhaps we are not at fault but we must at least be defective. Take responsibility, man!
Sometimes there is nothing to be done. Sometimes -- many times -- it is not your responsibility. The responsibility was someone else's, or no-one else's at all. Responsibility is not always transferable and evil is not an equation that can be balanced with willpower and sweat.
As a Christian who grew up in the church from birth I have both advantages and disadvantages in understanding my own faith. If a man with life experience takes up the Bible and starts reading he will generally see differences between what he reads and what he thinks and he will KNOW they are differences. I, being bathed in these ideas from birth, find it an ongoing process to discern the difference between actual Biblical doctrine and the attitudes of general culture. There was no sudden change.
Relevant to this article, the idea that the Fall of Man recorded in Genesis brought a sin nature upon all the descendants of Adam was an idea I could recite from youth but it wasn't something I really understood. I had absorbed the bootstrap ideas of the larger culture and did not discern the significance of what I read. It is only in my thirties that I grasp the obvious statement of Scripture: a monstrous decision was made in the past that set everyone yet unborn on an irrevocable path. We cannot pull ourselves out of it by our bootstraps. We cannot undertake the responsibility of diverting the stream of events back onto the original riverbed. There is nothing to be done. God himself did not reset the upended cart but instead made something new in the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus.
This is a stunningly different perspective on problems than is held by our general culture. You don't have to share my religious perspective to recognize that contrary to our buoyant cultural assumptions some things just can't be fixed. Many evils are inherited carved in stone with no recourse.
It is not our burden to roll back time.
Sometimes we are at fault. We must address our guilt. Sometimes we have responsibilities. We must do our duty. Sometimes a problem isn't our fault and it isn't our responsibility and it isn't our burden to shoulder.
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