Do we live in a culture of "learned helplessness" where assigning blame is more...

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...important than change? This seems to be a common feature, not just of protest movements but attitudes to life in general.

Taking a non gender debate:

Global warming doesn't exists.
Then it exists, but wasn't man made.
Then it is man made (or affected by us), but we can't change our habits.
Then it's too late.

On gender arguments, it seems that many times people agree that there's a problem, and after that the energy is not spent on how to fix it, but on whos fault it is.

For example, men protest that child custody is "unfair" but do we want more access, do we want to pay less support...easy to see the problem, easy to dish out blame. Not so easy to solve.

And what about unequal punishment for the same crime. Do we want to see women punished more? Or men being rehabilitated as mras claim women are? Again easy to see the problem, easy to assign blame. Hard to find a solution.

It's not at all unique to the mens movement, it seems to plague every political and social organization.

Noam Chomsky made an interesting point. He said (roughly) - when I go to Rwanda, scene of famine, violence, terrible deprivation, the people there tell me what they are doing about it. they don't ask how they can help. They are not paralyzed into helplessness. They know the obstacles they must overcome. They are acting to overcome them.

Yet we in the west seem to suffer under different delusions. We have come to believe that we cannot change things.

Joel Straczynski, the Sci Fi writer wrote "Oh people can change things, things change all the time. It's a matter of who is making the changes, and why."

For the mens movement in particular, what are the challenges. Are we complaining in order simply to blame? Is assigning blame more important than affecting change?
 
Helplessness is being rewarded, programs that were designed to help the truly disadvanteged are being taken advantage of, so it is no wonder that behavioural pattern is on the rise.

And as for joint custody if you have the kid more you spend less in child support because you spend direclty on the kid, so yes it is easy to solve, apart from the fact that some men were stupid enough to marry women who saw divorce as an option.

We need to create a world again where the hard working family men is rewarded and not the playa, only then things will change.
 
I think is less about learned helplessness and more about social loafing. Maybe mixed in a little self-efficacy where anything bad that you do is due to external environment factors and anything good that you do is due to internal factors. It's human tendency to play the blame game. It helps with the self-esteem. It's not a bad thing until it becomes discrimination.
 
Good points.

I agree that we not only have a culture of, as you say, "learned helplessness", we have another, more insidious version of it: Victimhood.

You do tend to come down on the femnist favoured side somewhat: it is not always about how one looks at a problem, it also has to do with the additional perceived obstacles that certain groups face when confronting problems.

Take me, I
 
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