Blame, responsibility and accountability

This shouldn't be a long post, but I believe it is a necessary one. Social interactions are complex. We have an endless list of written and unwritten rules for how to act and behave. People are brought up within a certain culture with shared values and understandings to minimise conflict and maximise potential. But it's not perfect. And I'm not an anthropologist.

My point is that, even for the individual, concepts such as self-responsibility are derived from social judgements and while there may be good reasons for their existence they are not always what they appear.  Or, to be more concise, just because someone is at fault doesn't mean it's their fault.

This is a concept I have held for quite a long time. From memory it started to crystallise for me when I spent time as a counsellor. People are not as able to control their environment as we like to believe. And self-image is not formed in a vacuum. These ideas led to me to increasingly identify cases where people were blamed, or blamed themselves, for problems in their lives. More often than not the problems appeared to me more an inevitable consequence of the environment they grew up in. Societal attitudes,  saturation advertising, explicit education - our beliefs and opinions are rarely our own, and to blame yourself for that seems foolish.

Note that this isn't an argument to abandon everything to fate. I believe it is possible to make a distinction between not accepting blame, but still taking responsibility to try and effect change. So while I may often disagree with what someone else thinks or believes, I very rarely blame them personally. I can understand and empathise with their position, and even accept that they may not be equipped at that moment in time to hold themselves accountable. This is the reality I accept, and when I talk about ways to approach self-improvement it is integral to the discussion.  Saying that a certain theory is valid...except for all the ways people fail - that is not a valid approach for me.  Imagining people to be an ideal mechanistic system has never worked. Context matters, environment matters, flawed perceptions and judgements matter. We don't need a scientific reduction of the fallibility of the human mind to accept its reality.