QotD: Responsibility

It's easy to amass a list of movements similar in nature to gun industry litigants represented by LAP. There's the it's-Philip-Morris's-fault-I-have-lung-cancer crowd, the it's-McDonald's-fault-I'm-a-pig crowd, and the ever-popular it's-the-bucket-company's-fault-my-child-drowned-in-it-while-I-wasn't-paying-attention crowd, just to name a few. An obvious unifying characteristic amongst all these groups is that their members seem to suffer from a severely stultifying form of cognition. Like lower animals, they seem stuck in a state of perpetual perception, unable to conceive of a world beyond the immediately visible and unable to differentiate between entities with volition and inanimate objects with none. As a dog excitedly chases its wagging tail in apparent oblivion that it is his own actions that cause the wagging, so these poor souls stumble through life wondering how it is that they keep swallowing cheeseburgers and inhaling tobacco.

But human beings simply can't survive in such a seriously degenerative state, and they don't — at least not all the time. Instead, they seem to fade in and out of this pre-human perspective. These same persons would laugh at a basketball player who blamed the ball every time he missed a shot, but when someone misuses a firearm, it's the gun's fault. This contradiction raises a serious moral question: are the Brady crusaders and their ilk doing this intentionally, or by accident? Do they — could they — really believe what they're saying, or do they know it to be false but preach it just the same?

Carter Laren, "Personal Lie-ability", Capitalism, 2005-10-09