Personal Responsibility and Competition are Inconsistent

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cubedemon6073
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15 May 2015, 5:05 pm

According to the Brookings Institute “Personal responsibility is the willingness to both accept the importance of standards that society establishes for individual behavior and to make strenuous personal efforts to live by those standards. But personal responsibility also means that when individuals fail to meet expected standards, they do not look around for some factor outside themselves to blame. Source: http://www.brookings.edu/research/artic ... ty-haskins We live in a society that values competition and we are very competitive as a people.

The very nature of a competition entails that it will have winners and it will have losers. Personal responsibility assumes that one has internal locus of control and according to Psych Central, Internal locus of control is "The belief that events in one’s life, whether good or bad, are caused by controllable factors such as one’s attitude, preparation, and effort." Source: http://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/20 ... f-control/

Now that we have established some definitions based upon the definitions personal responsibility and internal locus of control is contrary to competition. In a competition, if one person wins someone has to lose at different moments in time. One can prepare and one can have a very positive attitude and put forth huge amounts of effort, the nature of competition is some will strike it big and some will end up poor, the nut houses or dead. If personal responsibility and internal locus of control held up and a person always had control of their lives and could always make the right decisions than anyone and everyone would be a winner and based upon the concept of competition someone has to lose.