The forces of Individual Action

The Issue that I would like to address :

" The concept of 'Individual responsibility' is a necessary fiction. Although societies must hold individuals accountable for their own actions, people's bahavior is largely determined by forces not of their own making"

The concept of ‘individual responsibility’ is a necessary fiction. Although societies must hold individuals accountable for their own actions, people’s behavior is largely determined by forces not of their own making.

People in the world have different task that corresponds to their behavior and decision. Nevertheless, activities are based on many experiences or cultural backgrounds that each individual uniquely has. The forces that are experiences, education level, community norms and rules, cultural background, and family condition are very influential to each people behavior, role, and manner in the community. Moreover, in several villages with strict norms, most people are controlled by the village law, such as in Padang, Indonesia that make the bride to pay certain amount of gold to marry the broom or in Javanese rites that forbid their children to marry people from other rite. In consequence, many actions in numerous areas are based on unlogical but relevant to each person backgrounds.

Before going further to describe the power that motivates people to have different actions, there is a big difference in responsibility depending on the the age or intelligence of each person. Normally, people with the age of older than 17 have bigger responsibility; yet, different country has different views on age. People with that age of 17 are allowed to drive having bigger risk of accident. Nevertheless, different country has different rules like in Finland that has a strict rule that individual starting from 21 year-old are allowed to drive, reflecting the degree of responsibility. Intelligence is one of the factors that influence the degree of responsibility. Logically, crazy people don’t have the opportunity to make their own decision. Moreover, the degree of education also influences the trust to decide something or becoming an example of certain behavior. Age and intellegince also correlated like in the case of in the age 17 people usually studies in college where provide them many opportunity to choose freely. As a result, the individual that has responsibility is in the age from 17 year-old and in a healthy phsycological condition.

Experiences are affecting every actions and behavior, like several height phobic behavior that is based on his/her experience of falling from high ground or his/her realtives accident from certain height. Many society tales are based on the elders experiences like not walking under that ladder is based on the experience that the ladder can be broken. Furthermore, family and education background are mainly influential on thrusting each person decision or behavior. One of the examples how education background affect individual’s way of thinking is between an artist with an engineer. An artist tend to design things esthaetically in the sense of beauty and harmony, yet an engineer design object based on it’s function so an engineer doesn’t care whether the object is solid unattractive thing as long as it can comply with the function of the object. Moreover, laws and norms are differentiating society in diverse areas, like between China that allows abortion because of the big number of population and Indonesia that uphold the Eastern culture and influenced mainly by Islamic rules forbid abortion except for the sake of the mother’s safety. Countless motives are forcing unique bahavior and action.

Inspite of the fact that many factors affected every decision and behavior, the spiritual concept of heaven and hell is definitely based on individual role in the community; therefore, each individual must be aware of the consequences. Moreover, laws are binding in the terms of individual, mostly. As a conclusion every individual despite of different or the invinsible hand that controls his/her behavior must realized that each behavior and action are affecting many people and can create bad or good consequences.