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The idea of personal responsibility sounds good. I see it as a concept most typically applied to others - in the sense they are accused of lacking it. I almost never see anyone using it in any other way than to blame other people for not taking responsibility for their lives, etc. Such defensiveness borders on denial. Personal responsibility is something that is either enforced or it doesn't happen in most people's lives.
It takes a lot to convince me that anyone ever takes personal responsibility for anything. To assume so can't just be naivete because many good people who are not naïve are very passionate about “personal responsibility” being the way to fix most of our human problems. But I think what they're doing is substituting idealism for practical possibility.
IMO, personal responsibility is either enforced or it doesn't exist in any statistically significant way. The same goes for social responsibility - except it's even more rare than personal responsibility. I don't accept people proclaiming their personal and social responsibility from the rooftop. Self-serving rhetoric isn't the same as the way things actually are.
The problem is one of proper perspective on idealism and its place in the scheme of things. Wishful thinking doesn't make things so. What makes things so is negotiating from positions of power in the real world. As far as humans are concerned, power and fear trump everything else - especially idealistic hopes and dreams. We either enforce things that are desirable for optimal societal performance or they do not occur - except among a tiny minority of personally and socially responsible individuals. This group is statistically insignificant and can not be taken as a representative sample of the human condition.
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