Systemic vs Individual Responsibility

You can't just personal responsibility your way out of deeply-ingrained societal issues.

Systemic problems require systemic fixes; waxing on about personal responsibility might assuage your feelings, but it does not change the facts.

Society has the problem, not the individuals.

This sounds awfully like blaming individuals for not being able to fix a systemic problem on their own.

You can't personal responsibility your way out of large-scale societal issues...

Because no one should be expected to solve a societal problem personally.

If that's the case, then the problem should be approached as a societal, "people don't understand the consequences of their actions" problem and not a "the economy is going to die tomorrow" problem.

I used to think this kind of thing too. It’s the most direct and obvious interpretation of what goes on in the world. But the reality is that such a system wouldn’t make any difference. In fact, that feedback loop already exists. The reason why it wouldn’t and doesn’t work, the reason why such corporations exist in the first place and the reason for almost all of our problems are all the same: people are not up to the task of running a society in which these problems are absent. No matter how ma

A society where over half the population is suffering from the same problem is one that needs systemic change. It doesn't make sense to blame the individual when it's a problem affecting everyone.

He didn't blame the individuals, instead he argued that there's a social problem which society needs to solve.