The self-help myth

What’s the point of responsibility? This seems like an odd question in an age when social inequalities, human rights abuses and climate change make it abundantly clear that we have an inescapable responsibility to others and the environment. And yet our age seems to be defined by an intractable paradox: taking on greater responsibility is ultimately useless in ensuring individual, collective or environmental wellbeing. The reason for this paradox is not that responsibility is pointless, but that the kind of responsibility we are encouraged – and in many instances, forced – to take is one that places the entire burden of systemic problems on us as individuals. For as Ronald Reagan asked in his first Inaugural Address in 1981, ‘if no-one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?’ One need only take a glance at the ever-increasing shelves of self-help books in bookstores to see that Reagan’s question has been effectively answered by the wider populace in the last four decades. Personal responsibility is the order of the day.

The pervasive rhetoric of personal responsibility has transformed the role of government and society in the neo-liberal era. Where once the role of government was to safeguard the general happiness of the majority of citizens, albeit to varying degrees, its primary role now is to facilitate the conditions where each citizen can take on more and more individual responsibility, absolving the state from responsibility towards its citizens. While