Quick snippet from yours truly on a common buzzword in modernity - "responsibility". Now, if you know me and know what I'm about to write, you're probably going to jump in and say "Eugene, you're just not taking responsibility like a man, you coward." "Responsibility" as a keyword has displaced earlier concepts like "obligation", "duty", "honor", and so on. This is a very deliberate choice, and you can see why if you think about it for five minutes. "Responsibility" implies a purely reactive position of the respondent, while obligations and duties are things imposed on you by another or by conditions around you. The former displaces an individual's relationships with others, while the latter necessarily imply relating to another entity, usually the state since they are in the end the final arbiter of what is and isn't a legal obligation. The militarization of society and the invasion of the state into private life presented people with a stark problem, because their obligations to the society in practice were vast and included things that were in a previous time largely ignored or only situationally enforced. There would be in the 20th century an obligation to conform not just behaviorally but for one's nature, biological or spiritual, to conform to something set by a foreign entity. "Thou art", rather than "thou shall not" or "thou shalt", is a way to put this. The demands of what you were supposed to be would be drastically revisited, because this was the beginning of widespread eugenic screening of the population, and over the 20th century all of the major institutions would be tasked primarily with documenting traits of the populace and weeding out undesirable elements. This became by the end of the century so dominant that it permeated the entire society of the world, and especially of America, where this concept of "responsibility" was played with most of all. The welfare reform act of the 1990s was the capstone to this, the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act". I don't know how people are to be held responsible for decisions that were made by governments and employers, since it had always been the obligation of the worker to show up if he or she wanted to be paid. Nothing about employment was charitable, and welfare payments always came with obligations. It worked this way in every country which subsidized its population, and the subsidy paid in welfare was not a "concession" demanded by the people but something which the state deemed useful for its short- and medium-term goals in an earlier time. If people had a choice, they would not accept charity nor wageslavery, but would demand the thing they wanted from the start, which is land and income to call their own and a level of independence that would allow them to consider themselves free, or as free as they were ever going to be. Had there been any effort to actually employ people, because there is certainly no shortage of work to be done and people were already overworked as it was, that would have been preferable over the intervention of social workers demanding sterilization and humiliation. The poor have long despised the welfare state, so much that a number of them would rather let the neoliberals gut the thing if it meant fewer social workers in their life. The repeal of welfare did not mean that at all though, as neoliberalism implied the state's vigorous punishment of the underclass. This punishment would be carried out in new ways, on many different fronts, but the result was always the same. The slogan was simple - "There is no alternative". Everything about the neoliberal project has been extremely active and pressing against the people, moreso than past attempts to intervene in the economy and activity of the people. Neoliberalism would not be sensical if it didn't imply this, and so new obligations would be invented that made it clear the intervention of state and corporate power was unbearable. When the state is now regulating your most basic language, forcing psychoactive drugs into the populace at an unprecedented level, fomenting chaos and depriving people of any genuine moral foundation with deliberate intent, you don't have a "response" to that. It's designed so all your choices lead to the same result - you lose.
We see this in many other phrases that are produced on a massive scale, with the same intent and purpose. These were introduced by thought leaders who wanted us to lose, and created thought forms that would work on us insidiously. Another is "self-esteem". Esteem by its nature is granted by another person to you. You can't have "self-esteem" unless you are opposed to yourself and internalize others' judgements of you. Most charitably it would be an example of increasing social awareness among people, but again, the society's command to most of its people is "die, die, die". It is no wonder that "self-esteem" as a concept has helped precisely zero people, because its intent is destructive. Again, this displaces earlier concepts like honor, dignity, trust, belonging, and so on, because those things would be stripped away, most especially for the lower classes who were to be excluded from society. "Respect" is another term that is introduced in contexts where it doesn't belong. Respect in its original meaning is between adversaries, implying fear. When introduced into a marriage, "respect" is a way of pitting husband and wife against each other. No marriage was ever built on "respect" unless the participants are into some freaky behaviors. Even here, "respect" is twisted to carry a particular meaning. Respect was a bilateral relationship, but the "demand for respect" from the upper class was nothing more than a demand for obedience and regard for arbitrary authority.
Much of this was only possible because authority was claimed entirely by the state, which imposed a condition which forbade us from exercising authority in our homes, and even in our own lives, over our own body. The reason for this is simple - eugenics cannot abide people holding their own body, unless they are of the most favored classes. The command of eugenics is that everyone and everything is subordinated utterly to the eugenic creed. If you have freedom, that freedom is only permissible if someone thinks and acts only in the ways eugenics commands. That discussion is for another day, though. It is worthwhile to note that this change in language was only possible because it was authoritatively imposed, and we were forbidden under threat of fear from speaking in the older, more honest way, or speaking in any way other than this rigid, artificial, militarized and destructive manner. The results of this engineering of language are there for all of us to see. Some of us mock this, but the extent of this malicious phraseology is such that we inadvertantly perpetuate the thing that is rotting our brains. It gets worse when people are locked in echo chambers, or they adopt the language of destructive cults. What we saw over the past two decades on the internet was set up not because the internet inherently creates this, but because language was engineered at the base level, punishing those who spoke in any way that was inimical to the goals of the eugenic creed. You can tell that people have an instinctive fear of any criticism of eugenics that crosses a line that would constitute meaningful action.