Responsibility Assumption - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The theme of responsibility assumption appears in several places in popular culture. For example, it appeared in Richard Bach's bestseller, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Bach addressed the topic more directly in a less-popular later book, Illusions.

John Denver, a proponent of est Erhard Seminars Training, wrote two songs about it, Farewell Andromeda (1973) and Looking for Space (1975), and the opening lines of Farewell Andromeda capture the essence of responsibility assumption:

Welcome to my morning, welcome to my day

I'm the one responsible, I made it just this way

To make myself some pictures, see what they might bring

I think I made it perfectly, I wouldn't change a thing

The 1956 movie Forbidden Planet featured an analogous concept to responsibility assumption, about a race who, through technology, became able to materialize their thoughts, to disastrous ends - and chose to die out (cf. above, on the willing victims of the Holocaust).

The 1967 television series The Prisoner featured an ambiguous climax spawning several interpretations, one of which implicates responsibility assumption. Throughout the short seventeen-episode series, the eponymous prisoner, a man held against his will by a mysterious group, attempted to determine—and in the final episode apparently succeeded in determining—the identity of the mysterious person who led the group and thus ultimately determined the prisoner's fate. The moment of revelation in which the mysterious leader was literally unmasked by the prisoner was brief and unclear, but there are fans of the series who believe the unmasked leader was the prisoner himself.

In 1962, the comic book superhero Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee, adopted the maxim, "With great power there must also come great responsibility" after his refusal to stop a thief led to the death of his Uncle Ben. The phrase has come into common usage as, "With great power comes great responsibility" and was used as the tagline for the 2002 Spider-Man movie.

In a deleted scene from the 1999 movie Dogma, a fallen angel explained how the subconscious demands of the damned that they be punished, as they believed God could never forgive their sins, remade the face of Hell from a simple separation from God into a "suffering pit."

Though these are prominent examples, varying degrees of the doctrine of responsibility assumption have formed a minor theme more broadly within the United States cultural landscape since the 1960s counterculture.

More generally, different cultures place different weight on individual responsibility and that this difference is manifested in folklore. In this view, the tale of the Fisherman and the Little Goldfish (in which the protagonist makes little effort to improve his lot) illustrates the denial of responsibility. In the late 20th century US, the best-selling didactic and allegorical fable Who Moved My Cheese? underscored personal responsibility for one's livelihood and thus well-being.