Interpretive Frame
This essay examines the cultural ideal of the autonomous self—the belief that individuals are, or should be, fully self-directing and self-sufficient agents. Focusing on economic life and educational merit in the United States, it reveals how this ideal is learned through stories and expectations, how it legitimizes inequality while appearing fair, and how it produces moral exhaustion, shame, and self-blame when lives unravel. The essay concludes by inviting a relational rethinking of responsibility and ethical agency as ongoing practice rather than moral stance.
In the United States, autonomy is treated less as an aspiration than as a moral baseline. The good person is imagined as self-made, self-directed, and resilient—capable of overcoming obstacles through effort, discipline, and personal responsibility. Independence is praised. Dependence is suspect. Success is celebrated as deserved; struggle is quietly individualized.
This story is not simply descriptive. It is normative. It teaches people who they are supposed to be.
Yet the autonomous self is not a universal human condition. It is a cultural achievement—one produced and sustained through economic arrangements, educational practices, and the stories a society tells about worth, effort, and success. When treated as natural or neutral, this ideal places a heavy burden on those whose lives do not conform to it.
Learning Autonomy: Stories We Grow Up Hearing
The myth of autonomy is learned long before it is questioned. It appears in childhood stories, popular culture, and everyday talk about achievement. Heroes solve problems alone. Cowboys ride into town, restore order, and move on without needing help. Superheroes possess extraordinary capacities that allow them to act decisively and independently. Vulnerability is temporary; dependence is incidental.
These stories do more than entertain. They shape expectations about agency. They teach that needing help is a sign of weakness, that moral strength lies in self-sufficiency, and that success is evidence of character rather than context.
As people move through schools and workplaces, these lessons are reinforced. Students are praised for individual achievement while structural advantages remain unnamed. Workers are evaluated on productivity as though effort unfolds independently of health, caregiving responsibilities, social networks, or economic security. Over time, people learn to interpret their experiences through a familiar cycle: what happens to them, what it means about who they are, and how they should respond. When the story of autonomy dominates, difficulty is translated into personal failure.
Economic Life and the Burden of Holding It Together
Nowhere is the burden of autonomy more visible than in economic life. Employment in the United States is not simply a means of livelihood; it is a measure of worth. Productivity, self-reliance, and adaptability are treated as moral virtues. Structural instability—precarious work, stagnant wages, inadequate healthcare, rising costs of living—is reframed as an individual challenge to be managed.
People are expected to “hold it together” regardless of circumstance. When they cannot, they often experience not only stress but shame. The language available to them emphasizes effort over condition, resilience over support. Moral exhaustion follows: the slow depletion that comes from carrying responsibilities that exceed one’s capacity while being told that capacity is a personal attribute.
This exhaustion is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a system that privatizes risk while celebrating autonomy.
Education, Merit, and the Appearance of Fairness
Educational institutions play a central role in sustaining the myth of the autonomous self through the language of merit. Grades, test scores, and credentials are presented as objective indicators of ability and effort. Success is framed as earned; failure as a signal to try harder.
Yet merit does not exist in isolation. It is produced at the intersection of social ascriptions—race, class, gender, disability, family resources, and cultural capital. Access to stable housing, quality schools, healthcare, and supportive networks shapes educational outcomes long before any individual choice is made.
Merit functions primarily to legitimize inequality while appearing fair. It converts structured advantage into moral achievement and structured disadvantage into personal deficiency. For those whose social positions align with institutional expectations—particularly White students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds—merit appears natural and deserved. Privilege remains invisible precisely because it is normalized.
For others, merit becomes a moving target, always just out of reach, accompanied by the quiet suggestion that effort alone should suffice.
Implication Without Blame
Recognizing the myth of autonomy is not about assigning guilt. Most people do not choose these stories; they inherit them. Many genuinely believe they succeeded solely through hard work because the conditions that supported them were rendered ordinary and unremarkable.
There is truth in the idea that we do not know what we do not know. However, awareness changes responsibility. Once people begin to see how autonomy myths operate—how they shape judgment, policy, and everyday interaction—ethical responsibility shifts. The task is no longer to prove independence, but to rethink how success and deservingness are understood and distributed.
This does not mean denying effort or agency. It means situating them.
Rethinking Responsibility Relationally
Agency does not disappear when autonomy is questioned. It is redefined. Agency is not a possession; it is a practice—one that unfolds within relationships, institutions, and histories. People act, but they do not act alone. Choices are real, but they are not made on an even playing field.
Ethical responsibility, then, is not a moral stance but a form of daily work. It involves noticing how one’s own success has been scaffolded, how institutional narratives privilege some experiences over others, and how everyday judgments about effort and worth participate in larger patterns of inequality.
For many White Americans, this requires rethinking privilege—not as personal fault, but as structured advantage that has been rendered invisible through stories of autonomy and merit. Denial of privilege is itself a product of the myth: if success is self-made, then advantage cannot be systemic.
An Open Question
If autonomy is learned rather than given, and if merit legitimizes inequality while appearing fair, then responsibility cannot rest solely on individual effort. The deeper question is whether a society organized around the autonomous self can meaningfully address interdependence without moralizing it.
This leaves us with an unsettled invitation rather than a conclusion: What would it mean to interpret success and deservingness relationally—acknowledging effort while refusing the stories that isolate it from history, structure, and support?
To begin asking this question is not to abandon responsibility. It is to practice it differently.
How to Quote This Article
Green, R. K. (2025). The myth of the autonomous self and the burden it creates. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/the-myth-of-the-autonomous-self-and-the-burden-it-creates/
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