I confess: I sometimes spend too much time on Facebook, and one of the things that keeps appearing there are posts from people, purporting to be alpha males, telling us that women cannot be trusted, that women will leave you for the handsomer or wealthier guy who happens to come along. Man are strong and blameless, and women are just there for men as long as no one better comes along. Lose your job — unjustly, of course — and women will leave, even though there are hundreds of thousands of wives who have stuck by husbands who’ve faced such reverses. These things are written by ‘men’ who never take responsibility for their own failures, but have to find someone else to blame.

If your wife leaves you, maybe it is because you just weren’t a good enough husband.

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Call it The Self-Pity Blame Loop. If you are unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of your own behavior, you must seek scapegoats to blame. This leads to a pattern, viewing yourself as the victim of unfair treatment, and indulging in self-pity, while becoming resentful of more fortunate people. . . .

If you know people like this, you know the key to their entire personality involves a single sentence: “It’s not my fault!“

We see this all the time, from the friend who didn’t get the position for which he believed he was best qualified because it was given to someone else, to young American men stuck working as baristas at Starbucks, who believe that they were robbed, robbed! because they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for their degree in English literature and still didn’t get hired on immediately as a junior vice president at some major corporation, to the reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader who was never hired by The Washington Post. But, but, but, someone else had connections! and it’s just not fair!

No one ever seems to realize that the other guy got the job because he interviewed better, or that they pursued a less-than-useful degree. No man ever seems to consider that he’s working slinging coffee at Starbucks for $15.00 an hour, and having to share a crappy apartment with four other guys, because when he didn’t get that corporate job, he also didn’t go out to a construction site and hire on as a laborer for $25.00 an hour, because it’s too hot and dirty out there. Wahhh!

Why do we have a bunch of illegal immigrants roofing houses or pouring concrete? Because the young American men who used to do those jobs are different from the young American ‘men’ of today.

How does someone become “homeless,” after all? Contemplating the problem of homelessness, many Americans who live “paycheck to paycheck” are tempted to think that we are just one misfortune away from being in such a situation ourselves. However, when we investigate the actual circumstances of the homeless, we discover that it is not mere bad luck that explains the problem. The vast majority of the homeless population are either mentally ill or addicted to drugs, or both. Many of them are, in fact, habitual criminals who ended up on the streets after being released from prison, and couldn’t find anyone — not their parents, not their siblings — willing to take them in.

That’s a long enough paragraph that could be shortened: the vast majority of the homeless are homeless because they’re junkies. They’re homeless and it’s their fault, for taking drugs in the first place, or committing crimes instead of working, or just generally not doing the right things in life.

So, what do we get? We get half a generation who think that they’ve just been treated unfairly, and that the only solution is socialism, to let the government take care of them, because, Heaven forfend! they can’t be expected to actually take care of themselves. They are willing to let the government control and run their lives. They think they’ll all get Upper East Side or perhaps Central Park West apartments rather than East New York or the Stalinist dreary block flats that actual government control built.

There’s only one solution: people need to take responsibility for themselves, need to attribute all of their failures to being their fault, and no one else’s. If you don’t take responsibility for where you have fallen short, for where you have failed, you will never be able to fix those problems and get back on the path to success.