It’s the genes, really, I can’t get up in the morning, it’s not possible, I can’t concentrate, it’s physiological predisposition. And it’s also the society that has changed me, really, I learned so many bad habits before I could even fight it. And so many frustrations – father was behaving terribly and mother was even worse, at school I experienced bullying, the teachers didn’t understand me, they never developed my personality... Yes, I know the word responsibility – the society has responsibility to take care of me because I am its product.

This is what we can often see around us, maybe not such an extreme case, but always claimed as an absolute matter of fact. The subject of personal responsibility is missing  at school. And even if it was not missing, the sole teaching of this subject would not probably change much. Responsibility must be felt, accepted. As long as we only talk about it, it is the responsibility of someone else. We can be explained at school how it influences the society if we avoid personal responsibility. But it is only in our own lives that we can show how responsible we really are.

This book is mainly about the manifestation of personal responsibility, i.e. about behaviour. It rests on the instruments created by the state and society: The state contributed by laws and the executive power and the society by forming habits, unwritten norms and shared social values.  Nevertheless, if we ask what a service of public interest, tradition and personal finance have in common, we can only find the common aspect of personal responsibility.

However, to be responsible does not mean the same as either to be socially “correct”, i.e. to do what the others do, or to be “obedient” within highly structured entities such as the army, where individual members prove their responsibility by obeying orders.  The responsibility is personal exactly because a person is responsible to himself.  It is surprising – if he is responsible to himself, he can forget about it – he can write an excuse for himself – someone can claim this. But then he resembles the person who explains everything as the fault of others, just like the one in the introduction.

Responsible people know that they respond for their actions even though it is not comfortable. Why? Because it is one of the most difficult cultural questions. Because the opposite is undignified. There is no perfect argumentation. There are no other reasons than that a man is a being which has his ideals, i.e. value orientation. He wants and should live in such a way that he does not have to be ashamed for himself.  Of course we can quite deliberately and pompously break social conventions without being ashamed. The question is, however, why we should do it.  It might have sense if it is a kind of provocation, but if the reason is resignation, it can bring us in asocial position and the result may be tragic for us as human beings.

Asocial behaviour can be a way of defence, it can be caused by some pathology, etc.  But often it is a result of failure in being personally responsible.  When we look at some asocial persons, we know how we don’t want to end. If you reject this, you should look at some notorious alcoholic, homeless person or other kind of asocial person. The point is not in judging them from the outside, but the fact is we don’t want to get into their social and especially human situation – it is intimidating for us. The thread of personal responsibility bears therefore other chapters which follow us in sometimes difficult problems of modern social infrastructure – there are whole networks of relations and connections which lead to the fact that we expect with incomprehensible self-evidence that we can go to fresh bread and newspaper in the morning, that there is warm water coming out of the tap and that there is light every time we switch on.  Millions of people’s personal responsibility plays a great role in this. It is important to know it, not to forget that no system works on its own without the participation of those who are involved.