Thursday, September 21, 2017

What is full human responsibility?


Because a man has memory and consciousness, he can tell himself his own story. If he habitually lies to himself, he loses the thread of his story, and then he is lost as in a nightmare. Full human responsibility is to tell yourself your story faithfully, which means to acknowledge yourself as the author of your acts and as the real and only cause of their consequences. When you tell yourself your own story, you are telling it to an inner listener that can falsify it in his turn, so you cannot be sure your story is genuine unless there is mutual trust between yourself as a teller and yourself as a listener. This double commitment to truth is greater than both the teller and the listener. It lies at the very root of one’s unity as a person. This unity comes from the origin of all unity, that is, the total unity of existence itself, or, in religious terms, from God. You can only be fully responsible for your inner truth if you tell your story to God.

Olavo de Carvalho