Take Responsibility for A World You Did Not Create

It’s the spiritually mature approach to the problems we face as a society.

One of the most common responses to many of the world’s problems is to say that it’s not yours to solve.

That response might take the form of “my ancestors didn’t own slaves, I didn’t participate in slavery, I’m not racist, etc.” and therefore, “this isn’t my problem to solve, I’m not part of the problem, so no I don’t have white privilege and shouldn’t pay for reparations with my tax dollars.”

Another version goes something like, “I am not responsible for all the plastic in the ocean, and I didn’t produce all the methane that’s heating the planet, and I recycle and sometimes compost, and so I don’t feel like I’m responsible for cleaning up the environment.”

Those are just two examples of the logic that shapes the predominant model of responsibility: It’s not my fault, so I don’t bear responsibility. We rely on a model of responsibility based on individual liability — if your actions are the primary or sole cause of harm, only then you are held responsible for them. This model also depends on that individual’s actions resolving the problem.

It’s a model of responsibility that isn’t designed to handle pressing issues requiring collective solutions, like eradicating racism and undoing climate change. These are not problems distinct from spirituality, for they bear on the capacity of people to live authentically and belong to this world.

The Ego Wants to Avoid Responsibility

Why do we adhere to this “fault” model of responsibility? It’s part of the ego’s response to the world it perceives as separate from it.

Defensiveness is one of the ego’s hallmarks. This kind of thinking often comes up when there’s a call to action, something that would require us to modify our behavior or make a sacrifice. We feel ashamed or guilty or oppressed by the sense of obligation. We don’t want to believe we benefit from or contribute to or are complicit with the harm. Because we don’t want to feel that way, our defensive response is, “I did not do this.”

Inadequacy is another hallmark. The other reason this model gets triggered is that a lot of social problems are well beyond the fix of any one individual. No single person is going to wake up tomorrow and reconfigure psyches and society so that racism is eradicated. No single person is going to wake up tomorrow and reconfigure every industry, get all corporations to take responsibility for their emissions, and create a new economy that solves the climate crisis.

When any single person’s actions seem trivial or inconsequential, we reason that because the individual isn’t solely at fault, and therefore isn’t individually responsible, even if the individual takes some responsibility, his or her actions to solve the problem feel meaningless. Inadequacy becomes the emotional response that justifies not taking responsibility.

If you’re not at “fault” and your actions alone can’t fix the problem, why bother? Why take any responsibility? Indeed, it starts to feel like assuming responsibility is a burden without end. Any sense of responsibility won’t be alleviated because the harm won’t be resolved by you any time soon. Accepting responsibility comes with continuously carrying the weight of the problem.

Spirituality Offers a New Model of Responsibility

Can we create a sense of responsibility that is not rooted in individual wrongdoing? Another model of responsibility would extend to issues that you in your individual capacity believe you did not cause or contribute to them. This is where spirituality meets social and political change.

We need a model of responsibility that says that the problem exists because I participate in a system that collectively suffers from this problem — and I am part of that system. It endangers the entire system, and therefore I have an interest in doing what I can to solve it, even if I am not at fault.

In a way, I’m talking about a system of responsibility sort of like a system of taxation. Taxation works to extract a certain amount of money to ensure that a system works as a whole, with members benefiting from the collective pooling of resources that any single person couldn’t afford or take care of on their own, and wouldn’t because they would be tied solely to their direct interests and needs. If we relied on philanthropy alone to fund public coffers, people would not give to, say, school districts where they weren’t going to enroll any children.

Imagine a world where we all contributed to ameliorating some issue because we saw that it was there and impinged on another human being’s capacity at self-realization. Even though my single contribution might be close to meaningless or negligible, I would still make it. On a collective level, we know that the aggregated effects of individual actions are meaningful. The problem is that each individual weighs whether to contribute if no one feels that same sense of obligation.

Individual responsibility — and the sacrifice it demands from each of us — will almost always butt up against our desire for comfort, convenience, and self-protection. Our individual interest, much like what happens with philanthropy, will win out. That’s why trickle-down economics fails — it presumes that individual interest aligns with collective interest, when in fact, it doesn’t.

The World Is My Responsibility

Spirituality helps us to contribute to issues that didn’t originate with us by, first, reframing our perspective on the distinction between the individual and the collective, and, two, shifting our understanding of what it means to solve problems.

Seeing Ourselves Honestly

First, we ought to realize that we benefit from and contribute to these larger problems, even if we alone are not responsible. White people enjoy benefits from white privilege and supremacy at the cost of Black people. Climate change requires that we make fundamental changes to our lifestyles, and those of us who won’t be directly affected by rising sea levels in our lifetimes can go ahead and defer the actions that inconvenience us, because no one is forcing us to do things like compost, fly less, give up plastic, or fight for massive changes to our sources of energy.

This is the inner work of taking responsibility for our actions, our internal psychic world, that in some way, participates in the creation of those broader, systemic issues. This is another version of saying that inner change must happen first, so that we can more skillfully interact with the world, instead of reproducing the very same consciousness that led to the issues in the first place.

Part of that shift also means jettisoning the crabbed, and all too prevalent, view that spirituality means that the world is an illusion, and I can just “ascend” to some realm where those tasks are beneath me. It means you see them from a different perspective, stripped of judgment and superiority, and recognize the source of the problems: the absence of love and compassion, the pain of separation and judgment.

Your Problem Is My Problem

But being here on the planet means inheriting problems that did not start with us, but that we accept as part of our willingness to heal the world. That means you don’t draw the line of responsibility when you don’t see any direct benefit from taking action or haven’t contributed directly to the harm. That means collective problems are not for others to solve, relieving you of any participation. You see them as yours to fix as well.

That doesn’t mean you become a martyr, sacrificing yourself for everyone. Instead, you understand that fixing it also doesn’t mean it's on your shoulders alone. It means you meet the world wholeheartedly, and ask with compassion: What can I do to contribute to this healing? That might be as simple as the intention, a prayer, a thought. It might mean something more, something that resembles traditional social and political activism.

That’s how you avoid the ego’s trap of overwhelm and inadequacy that leads to throwing up your arms and saying, It’s too much more me. I’m going to binge on Netflix. You’re not obligated to solve, on your own, all of the world’s issues. No one can. But you don’t need to turn away because you, like every other human being on the planet, are inadequate to such a task.

This is the crux of the spiritual path when it faces society’s woes. In the Zen tradition, this is embodied in the vow of the Boddhisattva: “Beings are numberless; I vow to save them.” The vow is a commitment to an impossibility: no single Boddhisattva can awaken and save all beings. The impossibility does not defeat the vow. It is a commitment to serve in the capacity of awakening, regardless of who presents themselves on the path.

It is a model for a kind of responsibility that does not look for liability, to intervene only to correct one’s own misdeeds, nor feel inadequate to and overwhelmed by that responsibility. It’s what it means to meet the world, in each moment, as it shows up, however it shows up, and say to it: I am you, and you are me. What needs to be done, and what can I do to help?