If you think you are responsible – you are responsible, and if you say you are not responsible – you are responsible. The only ones out of this impasse are the few who know what is going on.
Beyond the instinctive responsibility, all creatures feel for their progeny, (leastwise those of the distaff design). As life drove homo sapiens to the new lands of civilization, it bred in him feelings of responsibility outside the familial ones. The closer did humans begin to live together, the more did they feel responsibilities that went beyond just their own welfare. They felt concern for the wellbeing of the group in which they had established residence, and accepted responsibility. This is the human way, the civilized and proper human way. But just being natural does not exempt it from close scrutiny by those to whom the family photos of man that life holds up do not hold up – do not reveal enough detail.
If an ordinary person feels they have some responsibility for some particular something in life, then they have a responsibility which they cannot avoid without negative consequences, (guilt, stress, frustration, irritation). If another person, feels the situation strongly enough to declare that they have no responsibility there toward, they likewise feel a responsibility that they deny at their expense. (It is still, figuratively speaking, amazing that otherwise sane people believe there is somewhere in the universe that they can hide from the universe: “Hey, I’ll just scrunch down over here in this dark corner and life won’t even know I’m here.”)
Even while life is making most of humanity feel they have some responsibility for the life of humanity, it is life which is totally responsible – including its responsibility for making most humans feel the responsibility that they do. ‘Tis comedically tempting to say that life has tricked and enslaved man to shoulder some of the responsibilities which are clearly life’s, except for the small problem of nothing in life being separable from it…other, of course, than in the thoughts. Men have their position relative to life…which are there again, courtesy of life. But rather than this being some questionable move by life, it is the height of efficiency. It is having the inner components of a Viva Machina assist directly in the performance of the overall machine.
J.