Diminished Personal Accountability:
Contributing Factors to a Growing Issue
Everywhere I go, it seems, I hear people expressing dismay at what they see as a decaying sense of personal accountability in American culture.
Many factors contribute to the decline. This episode is the second in a multipart series which analyzes these factors from historical, sociological, and psychological standpoints.
This episode traces the adverse impact of three of these factors on personal accountability:

Structural breakdown of the American family -- with 18 million children living in single-parent homes, the stability of marriage and family is clearly on shaky ground. Yet family is the very institution which has historically instilled a sense of personal responsibility and accountability in the upcoming generation.

Growth of a victim mindset -- increasingly in recent years, aggrieved parties are quick to describe themselves as a victim. By its very nature, however, a victim mentality minimizes one's sense of personal responsibility for what has befallen us. Someone else is to blame. But without a sense of responsibility, there is little sense of accountability.

Expansive urbanization -- one by-product of urban sprawl is a feeling of anonymity, i.e., living as a nameless face in a massive crowd. Because anonymity fosters emotional detachment from those nearby, it likewise invites us to shirk our responsibility and accountability toward them.

Later episodes in this series will delve into leadership's role and options in combating a rising tide of non-accountability. The initial programs, however, are examining root causes for our growing accountability crisis.
A printed transcript of this episode is available at https://www.UpsizeYourLeadership.com/episodes.
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