RP communities are a bit weird about casting blame.

  • There's one camp (usually the black pill or MGTOW-sympathizers) who want to point the finger at women for everything going wrong in the world.

  • There's another camp (usually those who have been invested in red pill communities for a while) who want to point the finger at men for dropping the ball and abandoning responsibility.

The former have good points because women have done a lot to screw our our world. The latter have good points too because men have let it happen and also done a lot to screw up our world.

There's a third category of people who love to point the finger. Know who they are? CHLIDREN. Everyone who cares about passing blame is acting childish.

PARENTING THROUGH BLAME

When has pointing the finger actually helped anyone? You know what I do when one of my kids tattles on another? I discipline the tattler every time. The accused only gets punished if I actually believe the accusation and it's not justified.

When these arguments come up, I have each kid give me their version of the story. I don't let the other kid interrupt while one is speaking. They'll get their turn later. I open with: "Tell me what happened." 99% of the time both kids will start with: "The other person did this ..." Often-times I'll cut that kid off right then and there and ask, "No, I want to know what you did." I'm less interested in the actual event of what happened and more interested in whether my child will be honest and own up to their own contribution to the problem. Fights big enough to make their way to me always have a 2-party contribution. If the kid insists in blaming before admitting their own fault, I cut them off, tell them they lost their chance to tell me their side of the story, and I move on to the other kid (if I'm feeling generous and the situation calls for it, sometimes I'll circle back).

I've resolved many parenting disputes among my 4 children. Them blaming each other has never helped a single one of them. My 10yr old son is smart. He's finally figured this out. When I ask, "Did you do something mean to your sister?" instead of trying to explain himself, he says, "Yes." When I ask him what he did, he tells me straight-up. Why does my son seem to "get it"? Because he's picked up on the fact that...

After he admits what he did, I ALWAYS ask the next question: "Why did you do it?"

Motive matters. But there's a huge difference between him trying to rationalize his way out of trouble and him giving me pertinent facts that I'm asking for. This is one of the most respectable aspects of my son and I love him for it (among many other things).

DON'T BE A CHILD

Christian or not, you should find use in this saying from the apostle Paul: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways" (1 Cor. 13:11). Men put childish ways behind them.

According to Paul, if you still act like a child, you are not a man yet.

Yeah, I get it. This leads into the very shaky territory of trying to define a "true man." There are lots of opinions on that. I'm not going to go there in this post. But I can say definitively that a child is not a man.

DON'T BE A WOMAN

The other angle to this is that most people who point the finger do so for a few key reasons:

  • They're emotionally upset and blaming is a temporary relief from guilt

  • They want their feelings validated

  • It averts accountability for one's own actions

  • There's an internal pressure toward appearing perfect, and accepting responsibility shatters that projection

  • A person's ego may be invested in their own self-image, which is broken when the "fault" rests with them

  • A person doesn't want to have to change, and if it's someone else is at fault it excuses one's own imperative to fix the problem or become someone better

Again, not to try to define what a man is ... I can say definitively that a man is not a woman and these are traits most commonly associated with women (or at least ones that are more appropriate or expected for women to maintain and men to grow out of). Just as you shouldn't be a child, you shouldn't be a woman either.

FAULT V. RESPONSIBILITY: A BETTER PARADIGM

Back to my son - you know why I appreciate his approach to being caught in a fight? He accepts responsibility. Even when it wasn't his fault, he (in most cases ... he is still 10, after all) recognizes that he did something to contribute to the problem and owns up to that. I don't get very much, "But my sister this" or "But my sister that" from him (again, it happens, but rarely). Either my wife or I are aware enough of what's going on in the house to know who's really at fault. We also know our kids well enough to have a pretty good idea what happened, even if we didn't see it ourselves. We know where the fault lies. But my love and respect for my son, and the way I treat him, is based less on whether or not he was at fault for what happened and more on whether or not he's going to own up to it - whether he takes responsibility.

Likewise, the Bible is pretty clear that God forgives our sins - our "faults". But despite this forgiveness, he still expects us to "confess our sins." Even though I'm already forgiven, confession still matters. Why? Because God wants to instill in us a character that takes responsibility for our actions. Consider the following examples:

  • Eve ate the fruit first. She gave it to Adam and he took it. Adam pointed the finger at Eve instead of confessing and repenting. God cursed him in addition to making him subject to death. I wonder how this story would have played out if Adam had owned up to it and didn't blame Eve for his own contribution to the problem.

  • Paul was a murderer(-helper?) who persecuted Christians and tried to hinder the work of the Spirit. After his conversion do we see him saying, "But, but, but ... God ... that was the old me. It's your fault for not saving me before that"? No. In fact, you'd think he'd try to hide that part of his life so other Christians wouldn't find out what he did, but instead he tells it as part of his testimony. His zeal as a Jew who persecuted the Church is something he boldly reminds the Philippians of (3:6). In 2 Cor. 12 he says he will "boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses" - and just a few verses before that we see that God had blessed him by letting him taste heaven before his death.

  • Joseph's brothers tied him up and sold him as a slave. Despite not being at fault for the situation, he accepted that he had to bear the responsibility that came with his new life as a slave - and God rewarded him for that, making him the second most powerful man in the nation. At no point do we see Joseph whining about how bad his brothers treated him. In the end, he forgave them, loved them, and blessed them.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN HOME

Let me add one more to the list above:

  • We sinned and ruined the world. Jesus had to bear indescribable torture and suffering to save us. Did he ever say, "But God ... it's their fault, not mine! I'm innocent"? No. He took it as his own responsibility to fix the mess we created. Why? Because that's what leaders do who want their venture to succeed.

In a corporate setting, the CEO is responsible for the mistakes of his employees. A military commander is responsible for what his privates do on the battlefield, even if he's not the one who ordered them to do it. Likewise, a husband is responsible for everything that goes on in his household because it's HIS household.

It doesn't matter if your wife is at fault. The husband is still responsible. You're the one who has the burden of dealing with the mess. Too many men love lording leadership without recognizing the responsibility that comes with it. I don't just mean the "responsibilities" of leading (though that matters too). Yes, you have to provide, protect, produce, etc. But part of the responsibility is figuring out how to deal with other people's messes - that you are responsible for what everyone else in your household does. I'll put on my lawyer hat: if your 8yr old kid hits a baseball through your neighbor's window, who do you think is going to pay for it? You. Because he's your kid and you're responsible, regardless of the fact that your kid was the one at fault. Of course, if he has an allowance or a piggy bank, you can teach him to share responsibility, but you are still the responsible person as the parent.

Most things that go wrong in the world are due to failure of leadership. If the way a man leads is not getting the results he wants (regardless of fault), the logical solution is to adjust your leadership strategy. Her job is to decide whether or not to follow. Now, this could lead to a frustrating cycle where a guy keeps changing strategies as his wife doesn't respond to each one. This is insanely rare because AWALT and typically respond well to predictable sets of good leadership qualities. Nevertheless, while secular guys who happened to marry an outlier may actually end up here, there is no excuse for Christian men. Why? Because we have a standard of leadership to stop the cycle.

Jesus' leadership strategy is the optimal one. Changes to our strategy should always be to adjust what we do to conform more to what Christ did. I don't mean what you think Jesus WOULD have done. I mean what he ACTUALLY DID. Too many people are ignorant of just how much Jesus modeled for us, as found in Scripture. If Jesus didn't, God did - and we know that Jesus did what he saw the Father doing, so if either God or Jesus did it, we can do likewise. In the end, your wife may still leave you, but at least you can go to God on judgment day and say, "Yes, my wife left me. But I didn't know a better way to lead her than the way you showed me, so I stuck with that and did what you did." I have to imagine God will respect that answer even over the man who manages to abandon Christ-likeness in order to pacify his wife and keep her from divorcing him. "Marriage in tact, God!" is going to be followed by the question: "Sure, but at what expense?" If you had to let her cut off your balls for her to stay, God's not going to let you into his assembly (Deuteronomy 23:1 - yeah, I'm stretching the metaphor, but roll with it).

On judgment day, I don't imagine God is going to care who is to blame. God isn't judging fault. He's judging "each person according to what he has done." Do what Jesus did. Worry less about blame, more about Christ-likeness. Just make sure you're actually looking at how Jesus handled situations, rather than making up hypotheticals of what you think he "would have" done based on some stereotypical notions you have in your head about who you think he was. We have a model. Look to the model, as shown to us through the Bible.