What is some commentary for a speech on responsibility towards society?

Answer 1

"Ask not what your country can do for you ask what can you do for your country."

These are perhaps the most famous words President John F. Kennedy ever spoke and the words have been echoed for close to fifty years now as a patriotic call of the individual to accept his or her responsibility towards society. Most people have heard the quote but who knows what Kennedy said exactly after that? The actual quote is from his inaugural address given on January 20th 1961 in which Kennedy said: "My fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world ask not what America will do for you but together we can do for the freedom of man." It is a sad commentary on both society and the individual that most people have no idea what followed Kennedy's call to patriotic duty and that duty to country is all that is remembered. The call for individual freedom, in today's world, has taken a backseat to duty towards society and duty towards society is a reckless and erratic driver at best, at worst a journey towards dictators and totalitarianism.

What exactly is an individual's responsibility towards society? Does the individual have some sort of unwritten contract with society where terms of the contract were decided by the will of the people? Is the individual required to submit his or her own free will to that of the general will? These are the hard questions that come with asking what our responsibility towards society is. For those who subscribe to the political thought that a social contract does indeed exist then there is an absolute requirement of the individual, implicitly agreed upon by the individuals decision to live within society, to submit to the general will of the people. This social contract however, can not be produced in a court of law as evidence of any binding effect. Constitutions are contracts made "by the people" that have some force or binding effect on those who live within that constitutional government but the so called social contract is no more than fancy phrasing intended to give collectivist politics some form of legal authority.

Before one asks what his or her responsibility is towards society one should first ask what is the responsibility towards oneself. Do you have a responsibility to survive? Do you have a responsibility to flourish and prosper? Surely, if you truly wish to fulfill some responsibility towards society shouldn't you at the very least ensure your own survival in order to fulfill responsibility towards society? If you are not flourishing and prospering just how much responsibility of society's can you accept? Accepting responsibility is not at all easy and one can easily look at their own past actions to find many refusals to accept responsibility for their actions. As more and more individuals get comfortable with the idea of refusing to accept responsibility for even their own actions, increasingly a society of irresponsible people prevail. What responsibility would one have to an irresponsible society? It is a fallacy to presume that one can accept responsibility towards society. Society does not exist in such a way to facilitate any meaningful end. Accept responsibility for yourself and your actions and accept responsibility for others and their actions, these are the only two possible choices to be made when it comes to accepting responsibility. One can chose one or the other or chose both but outside of those three choices accepting responsibility becomes empty rhetoric.

There are many examples of historical figures and unknown soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the "good of society" but in each instance the actions defined as "sacrifice for the good of society" were made by individuals who acted upon their own individual free will. The soldier who falls upon a grenade to protect his fellow soldiers from the same death he has accepted is not an action made out of obligation towards society, it is a selfish action made by an individual who had the presence of mind to understand that his life was forfeit the minute the grenade landed in his vicinity and he can stand there and die with his comrades or act to save his comrades minimizing the tragedy of his own death. It is a good and noble action not because it conforms to responsibility towards society but because it aims to accomplish the greater good. The greatest good to the greatest amount should be anyone's primary goal when accepting responsibility.

No one will ever achieve the greater good by accepting an idea that their own needs are less important than the needs of a collective. If any collective is to prosper and flourish it must necessarily have individuals within that collective who prosper and flourish. The more individuals with in the collective who flourish and prosper the more prosperous the collective becomes. The collective can not ensure any individuals prosperity but individuals can ensure the collectives prosperity only by first ensuring that they as individuals flourish and prosper. What is your responsibility towards society you ask? Ask not what your country can do for you nor should you ask what you can do for your country but instead ask what can you do for yourself and how can you be free to do for yourself and when you've done this and when you finally begin to flourish and prosper then look around and ask those around you what you can do for them and their freedom to do for themselves. If we all did this the question of responsibility towards society would never be asked at all.