Building on my last post… Politicians talk about responsibility in society (not to mention responsibility in government) but virtually everything they exemplify and enact tends to counterproduce genuine public responsibility.
I’m most concerned with how the notion of “responsibilities” (as in Palin’s joke that a mayor is like a community organizer with “actual responsibilities”) has been muddled and reduced to a human resources concept referring to routinized tasks leading to recognizable accomplishments.
To be fair, Guiliani and Palin’s rhetorical sneers at community organizing shouldn’t be taken as any more sincere than McCain’s contradictory appeals to the value of service and sacrifice:
“My friends, if you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you’re disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them….
“Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an — an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed.
“Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier, because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.
That’s well said, but the message from the rest of the convention was that if you spend a few early years of your life trying to do the right thing, don’t bother running for president because you’ll get laughed out of the convention hall and conservative commentators will accuse you of being a “chronic underachiever” (twice).
(Btw, “defend the rights of the oppressed?” Would those be the same rights that were the subject of another of Palin’s distasteful jokes?)
The notion of “responsibilities” as objective functions listed on a résumé is in many ways antithetical to the attitude of genuine civic responsibility, which involves responding to new challenges that occur outside of routines, postponing the need for concrete “accomplishments” in favour of long-term growth, sharing credit (if not giving up credit altogether) and accepting a share of the blame.
And I’m sure Sarah Palin (who compared herself to Harry Truman) is familiar with Truman’s claim that, “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
(I highly recommend Jim Collins’s work on “Level 5 Leadership,” where I first came across that quote from Truman, which has come to represent one of my core principles.)
The notion of “responsibilities,” as used in Palin’s joke, means being compelled by rules and expectations; that doesn’t necessarily mean the person who has “responsibilities” assumes any Responsibility for what those “responsibilities” are.
Ironically, citing “responsibilities” in the human resources sense can be a way to try evading genuine Responsibility in the more meaningful sense (which I’m capitalizing here to highlight the distinction).
For example, people who work for companies have “responsibilities” as part of their job that are Ir-Responsible in the context of greater social and economic good — as well as the good of the company and its shareholders, as was demonstrated by the downfall of Enron, Northern Rock, and Bear Stearns.
People working for failed companies might say “I was just doing my job” (i.e. “carrying out my responsibilities”), but that doesn’t excuse them from Responsibility. Likewise, “I was just following orders” doesn’t necessarily excuse soldiers from Responsibility for inhumane acts.
(Another business book I highly recommend is The Responsibility Virus, by Roger Martin, dean of U of T’s Rotman School of Management. It’s about how our fear of failure causes some people to abdicate Responsibility while others heroically assume too much. Also relevant is this article that highlights the relationship between shareholder value social virtue.)
Great companies are organized in a way that empowers everyone in them to assume genuine Responsibility for sustainable growth. For this to happen, people at the many edges, niches and nodes of the organization have to be willing to accept and share Responsibility, while people at the “top” or “centre” of the organization have to actively distribute it through empowerment and education — which ultimately means sharing responsibility for distributing Responsibility.
“Empowerment” doesn’t just mean conferring freedom and assigning technical “responsibilities”; empowerment means effective facilitation and education — providing resources and tools that associates can use to cultivate knowledge, competence, and Responsibility.
Likewise with great societies. In A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippman claimed that, “The real law under which modern society is administered is neither the accumulated precedents of tradition nor a set of commands originating from on high which are imposed like orders in an army upon the rank and file below. The real law in the modern state is the multitude of little decisions made daily by millions… Government is in the people and stays there. Government is their multitudinous decisions in concrete situations, and what officials do is to assist and facilitate in this process of governing.”
The kind of deceptive rhetoric coming out of the Republican convention is disempowering. By distorting truth and rendering words meaningless, those resources for Responsibility are destroyed.
Voters lose because they lack the means to make informed, accountable decisions — not just regarding which politicians will best represent their best interests, but more importantly, what their best interests are to begin with.
Politicians lose because it becomes more difficult to figure out what voters want and need in the long-term, so they resort to expensive research and advertising tactics, which turn into even more expensive arms races with ever-diminishing returns as voters become increasingly fickle.
This is a degenerative cycle, as voters and politicians encourage one another to become less and less Responsible.
Voters are failing to demand integrity and truth from politicians, while politicians fail to provide examples of what that means, so voters lack the models and vocabulary with which to demand it, and politicians allow themselves to slide even further as voters are failing to make them accountable.
So who’s to blame for this degenerative cycle? Who should be responsible for turning it around? Does the way to make things better begin with politicians or voters?
The answer to the last question is, neither and both. It doesn’t matter who you are, how much money you have, where you live, who you know, or how powerful and knowledgeable you are, Responsibility always begins and ends with you.
