Why The Phrase “I Believe in Personal Responsibility” is Really a Way to Protect Your Mental Health

Eric Esqueda
4 min readMay 14, 2022
I just googled personal responsibility and this was the first image

Disclaimer: I am NOT a political conservative or even a political communist; I ascribe to some principles the political left have come up with, but that’s the extent of my political philosophy now.

But, I’ve heard the phrase “I believe in personal responsibility” more from conservatives than anyone else; and it’s not a bad thing. I’ve long been seeing that the higher someone is in socio-economic status…the more they can dabble in liberal ideas; in how they see religion, personal politics, and the concept of political power just in general. This is to say, a lot of conservativism isn’t a philosophy of the rich; it’s usually a philosophy for the poor.

Western philosophy (a philosophy that can probably trace its roots to Rome), usually thinks of itself as the first authority people should look to in their lives. It’s where concepts of empiricism and science come from, and where a lot of not-so-great elements in most modern-day societies come from. Here the Christian God reigns supreme, so much so that to question any of the ideas here would still cast you in an unfavorable light amongst many people and especially many academics.

I want to be clear that the western notion of conservatism isn’t so much bad as it is, misguided; it’s

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Eric Esqueda

Writer/poet for hire &fighting game enthusiast. Where I write about my writing process, my journey playing fighting games. And my process writing poetry.