Non-Self-Responsibility: Unintegrity Pandemic Variety #4
Non-self-responsibility means denying any part in what happened between us or claiming that what I did is not my fault.
Example of Unintegrity Through Non-Self-Responsibility: From Early Childhood
This version of Unintegrity is so well-understood that I will offer only one example. Before I do, I want to lighten things up for a moment because I know that all this Unintegrity stuff can be pretty disheartening to read about all in one place.
So, I will tell you humorous but instructive little story about non-self-responsibility. It is a story about how young we are when we start learning the low art of Unintegrity. This example is not only about non-self-responsibility but about lying (Unintegrity variety #1).
I was maybe three years old. I was, if anything, an overly well-mannered and overly responsible child. One day, I was playing in the living room and bumped into a sofa side table, knocking off a vase. It fell to the floor and shattered.
By the time my Mom came in to find out what had happened, I had already put as much distance as possible between the vase and me. She calmly asked me, in a non-accusing tone, how the vase broke. I will never forget my response. I innocently replied, “It did it by itself!”
Another Example of Unintegrity Through Non-Self-Responsibility: The Litigation Epidemic
We all know how rampant the litigation epidemic is. Ask any judge how overburdened the court system is with litigation issues: individuals suing individuals or companies or the government, companies being sued by groups of individuals (class action lawsuits) or the government, businesses suing other businesses, and individuals, businesses or countries suing other countries.
With the caveat that sometimes litigation is truly a proper course of action, let us briefly look at the Unintegrity that lives beneath the other litigation suits (the majority of them, it seems to me).
Litigation comes about when one party believes they have been wronged by another but that party will not take responsibility for having done this – or at least not as much responsibility as the party who feels wronged wants them to take.
Here is the essence of the non-self-responsibility that leads to litigation: “It’s not my fault. If it’s not my fault then it’s yours. You therefore owe it to me to take care of me. And I am going to make you do this.”
There are two main non-self-responsibility variations:
1. You won’t own your part in what occurred or you won’t do your part to make it right.
2. I won’t own my part in what occurred and I want you to do both your part and my part to make it right.
Not taking responsibility is largely about perpetrator-victim mentality. The perpetrator disowns responsibility by saying, “Let me see how much I can get away with,” or “It’s someone else’s fault that what I did was wrong, so don’t look at me,” or “You had it coming to you.” The victim disowns responsibility by saying, “You should make me whole because my part in this is small or irrelevant compared to yours” or “Others like you have wronged me in the past but I could not make them pay, so I will try to make you pay not only for what you did but for what they did too.”
If you look closely at the perpetrator’s position and the victim’s position, there is very little difference between the two. They are both about narcissism (self-centeredness) and entitlement (I am innocent and you owe me).
The litigation epidemic illustrates how non-self-responsibility goes hand-in-hand with the lying and obsession forms of Unintegrity.
Frivolous litigation, no matter how socially sanctioned it has become, is unmitigated Unintegrity, plain and simple. Case closed.
