SafetyCerts! Stages of community building by M. Scott Peck - Footnotes to Crossroads Dispatches. Excerpt from the book A World Waiting to be Born by M.
Scott Peck (Bantam Books, New York, 1993) via The Foundation for Community Encouragement's website. I still have this book on hold at the library, and will read next after I finish The Different Drum. My notes from The Different Drum are here and here. Pseudocommunity For many groups or organizations the most common initial stage, pseudocommunity, is the only one. Responsibility. Moral responsibility. People who have moral responsibility for an action are called moral agents. Agents are capable of reflecting on their situation, forming intentions about how they will act, and then carrying out that action. The notion of free will is an important issue in the debate on whether individuals are ever morally responsible for their actions and, if so, in what sense. Incompatibilists think that determinism is at odds with free will, whereas compatibilists think the two can coexist.
Moral responsibility is not necessarily the same as legal responsibility. A person is legally responsible for an event when it is that person who is liable to be penalised in the court system for an event. Accepting Personal Responsibility. Life is full of choices, and what you make of them determines your entire experience.
Sometimes you may swim against the current, and other times you may go with the flow. Recognizing that the outcome of your life is a product of your decisions is what accepting personal responsibility is all about. Weather any storm that may come your way like the captain of a ship, since after all, calm waters never made a skillful sailor. In the “Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health,” sociology professors Catherine E. Ross and John Mirowsky describe how some people “attribute the events and conditions of their lives to their own actions, while others believe their lives are shaped by forces external to themselves, like luck, chance, fate or powerful others.”