Friday, January 13, 2006

Organized irresponsibility

Organized irresponsibility is prevalent in our society, whether political, corporate or social. Not that I mean that people themselves are irresponsible (although in many causes they are), but rather that responsibility is displaced because of organization. We have, for instance, the concept of "corporate personhood", which is absolutely absurd and serves only the goal of shielding people (especially CEOs and stockholders in big companies) from responsibility.

This leads to people being accused of the crimes of others who worked for the same company or organization. This kind of thinking, pushed to the extreme, has led to things such as demands for "reparation" by racially-motivated organizations, when in modern times there are no remaining victims or criminals to pay off or get money from. This is allowed to exist because of the victimocrat context - as a group of "victims", one must consider others as "the enemy" even if the reason for such labels is long gone, because the group identity depends on it.

The concept of organized irresponsibility in general, has more profound and grave consequences. This is reflected in the good old excuse of "just following orders". People think that, because an action was sanctioned by the organization, responsibility must be suspended. It's also hard to stand up and refuse to act within a culture that cultivates organizational irresponsibility.

One factor that must contribute to this irresponsibility is the natural human instinct to obey figures of authority. The person is then left to rationalize for himself the actions he has committed under this impulse. It's easy to rationalize that "they know best" and "it's not my business". The Nazis have proven that genocide can be committed on such a basis. So has organized religion, in the name of the "supreme authority". In either case, the source of all evil is the refusal to recognize one's own values and act on them. This is the antithesis of individuality.

To have a society based on justice and individualism, it would be necessary to start making people account for their own actions, even if they are part of an organizational process. This would force people to think about their actions and assume responsibility for them. I think this would also restore a lot of individualism in our society.

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