Lifestyle changes are hard, no doubt. However, failure to implement desired lifestyle changes is doubly difficult for the change initiator. We all have good intentions. We all think of ourselves as ethically sound and well-intentioned people. However, we seek to blame others or other circumstances for our own failures.

At the blame end are the conspiracy theorists, marching in unison with the racist element.

I have an old friend who I think falls into, if not both categories, then a conspiracy buff. His claim is that the Chinese are strategizing to take over the free world. His factual basis? In reality, your factual basis is a fact only in your own thoughts. The theory started to take hold of him when he lost his job to an Asian person. Then he lost another. And other. He never once took a self-assessment and said, “Maybe there’s something I’m doing wrong.” Instead, the easiest way was to blame the Asian community for stealing his job.

Then it was his acknowledgment that there were thousands of Chinese students at our universities, taking away, according to him, places from Canadians. He ignored the reality that no Canadian was ever turned away as a result of a foreign student buying his way there. Like my friend’s jobs, the seats were filled with students who had the dedication to further their education.

So my friend opted to add to his arsenal of “proof” that the Chinese were sending only the brightest to “their” country, and that they were acting as a vanguard, who would use their superior knowledge to take over. Once again, he dismisses the idea that Canadian authorities scrutinized individual families and decided which students got visas. To assume these were “spies” bordered on the ridiculous, but conspiracy theorists tend to ignore the realities in favor of bias. It’s easier to blame others than to look at uncomfortable truths.

My old friend goes on to claim that the tens of thousands of economic immigrants that arrive each year are actually also sent by the Chinese government to take over our economy. Maybe a little bit of truth. The investment of foreign interests in our country is enormous. But we made the decision to accept the contributions, so it is difficult to blame the Chinese authorities for our decisions. Still, millions upon thousands ignore the facts and blame the Chinese.

My brother, like my friend, lost his job with an Asian worker. The fact that the Asian worker was a much better employee than my brother does not stop my relatives from claiming that the Filipino community is conspiring to take our jobs away. He tops that claim by claiming that his former employer, a Jewish person, is part of a global Jewish plot. I guess the Filipinos are now part of that sinister program? What my brother doesn’t know is that we are part Jews! Does that make him part of the conspiracy? He rationalized that fact, briefly, by denying his origins. That is, until my research proved otherwise, and then claimed that there might be some Jews who were not part of the universal fabric.

These two anecdotes seem like a far cry from discussions of lifestyle changes and guilt, but they’re not.

How many millions of us have tried, dozens of times, to go on a diet, but have failed? How many have made New Year’s resolutions, but lacked the commitment to stick to them beyond January? And, in turn, how many of us have said, “That diet doesn’t work.”

Diets neither work nor fail. The job is in the hands of the dieter. We simply choose to deflect blame and refuse to accept personal responsibility.

This deviation occurs regularly. “The government should do this,” or “that accident happened because the city didn’t clear the road,” and so on. The truth? We are the government, so we make decisions, and the government we have is the one we allow to be established. The accident always occurs because someone does not take due care, given the conditions in which he was driving.

We mourn the high crime rates, but we hope others will take action to prevent crime. We cry over high fuel prices, then we raise those prices by driving large vehicles, using excessive amounts of petroleum-based products, and investing in oil companies so that we can benefit from rising stock prices. We blame the rich for getting rich, and then aggressively seek to enrich ourselves.

In an early study (1960s), the lawyers in a shoplifting case in Britain found a young man guilty of stealing a few pounds worth of property, sentenced him to a heavy sentence, and then took the afternoon to discuss, among them, how to inflate your money. expense claims for trial! The Kitty Genovese incident of the 1960s is one of thousands in which people have chosen not to come to the aid of someone in dire need, choosing instead to wait for others to step up instead. .

Personal responsibility is difficult. Accepting responsibility for our actions takes effort and can often cost us. However, the lack of acceptance of personal responsibility for ethical action costs us much more, in internal esteem.

When we do the hard thing and make moral and ethical decisions no matter the cost, the ease with which we live with ourselves becomes greater, while the more frequently we choose the easy and less ethical answer, the more angst and anguish we face inside.

The best diet, the most difficult to adhere to, is not one that involves real food. It is what keeps us from attributing blame to others and leads us to accept responsibility for who we are, who we want to be and how we want the world around us to evolve. Stop blaming the diet! Be the ethical dieter. It’s not the diet that doesn’t work: it’s that people don’t implement it.