Blame, Fault, Excuses, Responsibility and Power

There are three things I have no use for. Blame, fault, and excuses.

What do they have in common?

They are actually all just the same thing. They modify the emotional context of a discussion while justifying not changing anything.

Blame pushes responsibility away from the blamer onto someone else. It let's them feel good about themselves by feeling bad about someone else. But more than anything else, it lets them decide that they do not need to change to fix whatever the problem is, someone else does.

Excuses are just the same thing, without a specific target. An excuse is a way for someone to feel good about themselves after things go wrong, but if they do not take responsibility for their contribution to the situation, how can they learn from it?

Fault, of course, is the bastard child of the two. 'It's his fault' is just blame. 'It's not my fault' is just an excuse. The currently popular 'through no fault of their own' is an odd case of pushing an excuse onto someone else.

In the end, they are all about avoiding responsibility. The thing is, most people never think about the relation between responsibility and power.

They are the exact same thing.

Responsibility and power are not related, they are not even two sides of the same coin. They are the exact same thing. When you avoid responsibility, you avoid power. When you take responsibility, you take power. There is no case where you can be responsible for something if you do not have power over it. There is no case where you can have power over something and not be responsible for it.

What you can do is deny responsibility. 'It's not my fault'. As soon as you deny that your actions, your power, affects your situation, that power is gone. You cannot learn to chose actions to better your situation if you deny that your actions affect your situation.

You can also take responsibility. When you do, suddenly every action you take has consequences that affect your situation. When life does not go as you wish it to, the question becomes 'How do I do better?'. And you will find answers, because the answers exist. And you will learn. How can you not, when failure to learn harms your life, and that is your responsibility?