Individual Responsibility.
It seems so harmless. Ask yourself, “am I responsible for my
own actions?” and I’m sure almost everyone reading this, maybe even all of you,
would answer in the affirmative. I choose to eat and to sleep; to work and
workout; and to live peacefully and live healthily (and if I don’t it’s of my
own choosing). Life is an ocean and I am a boat: even when the water is rough
I’m still in control of my own destiny.
I disagree.
In fact, I think the outwardly fairly reasonable idea that
we are responsible for ourselves and our actions is the driving force behind a
significant portion of the world’s ills.
The corrupting influence of big business, the destruction of
the environment, the perpetuation of racism, the slow death of public services –
these all stem from the innocent-sounding ideal of individual responsibility. A
ridiculous statement? Let me explain.
***
There’s little wonder the notion of individual
responsibility has gained such traction.
I make my own destiny. I am beholden to nobody but myself. These are
liberating mantras, no doubt, and are on what the American Dream is based. If
you work hard enough you will make something of yourself, and nothing and no
one can stop you. Your family background is irrelevant. The colour of your skin
doesn’t matter. Success is gender-blind.
The idea of individual responsibility is the golden bullet
of right wing, business-friendly thought. It is impervious to criticism: if you
question someone’s autonomy – particularly in America – you are saying they
cannot look after themselves, that they are not in charge if their own destiny,
that there are factors outside their control that hold them back. For a politician
to say such a thing would be political suicide. It goes against everything
America was built on.
Furthermore, individual responsibility and the entrepreneurial
attitude it breeds are the cornerstone of the free market. The free market is
the freedom to sell products to consumers who are free to spend money how they
wish, pinned on the assumption that everyone is capable of making intelligent
autonomous decisions. The American economic miracle is the result. There is no
denying how well it worked, and I’m not going to argue against deregulated
capitalism being the most effective method of galvanising a nation’s economy.
It’s economic rocket fuel. It’s no more than a bland truism to say the free
market has produced a lot of amazing things.
However, I think capitalism has gone too far. It has
overreached itself. The thrusters remain on full power, and we are at risk of
passing out of orbit. Money, ever more concentrated in the top end of the
business elite, has allowed corporations to shape western society for their own
gain. How can a governor or politician resist the proverbial briefcase full of
cash in return for something as minor as re-wording a bill or taking a business-friendly
stance an on a particular issue? They can’t. Humans aren’t that strong, we aren’t
incorruptible. Laws are fallible and can be unpicked, and top lawyers can twist
words to any desired end. We need a system that protects us against our own
weakness; currently we have one that exploits it.
If anything is to be done, we must look to the root cause and loosen the tight, suffocating grip the ideology of individual responsibility has over our lives.
***
Businesses love the idea of individual responsibility because
it allows them to sell harmful and damaging products with no fear of recourse
under the auspices of “consumer choice”. This is the cornerstone of the free
market. One of my favourite illustrations of this is in an episode of Parks and
Recreation, in which Leslie Knope battles to prevent the show’s representation
of big business, a local soft drinks company called Sweetums, from selling enormous
256oz sugar drinks, for which the city has developed a craving.
She is ruthlessly and efficiently attacked by Sweetums representatives
in local politics and in the media as an enemy of consumer choice and the free
market – essentially as an enemy of individual responsibility and, ultimately,
America itself. Leslie didn’t think people were necessarily able to make wise
decisions about what they consume for themselves, but there’s no way she could
express that without immediately being voted out of office. She would
effectively be saying, in the minds of the Pawnee residents, “you are too
stupid to look after yourself”. There was no nice US sitcom ending to the
episode: Sweetums won.
Leslie understands that, despite loud proclamations about
freedom and individual responsibility, we are no match for modern marketing
campaigns carried out by powerful businesses with stooges in the media and
politics, and she wanted to protect Pawnee from that. However, as a public
servant in a democratic society, she needs votes, but prevailing attitudes are
so pro-business that any other line would ensure a swift and decisive defeat at
the polls. Democracy is the great enabler in this scenario.
Marketing is very different today than it was fifty years
ago, when capitalism was still relatively naïve. Back then, products were
advertised on the back of their qualities. This car is faster than that car;
this hammer is more ergonomic than that hammer. Watch an advert for Coca-Cola
or McDonalds today and their message is entirely different. Modern marketing
campaigns position a product as part of an identity: if you drink Coke you are
healthy in mind, body and spirit,[1]
while McDonalds markets itself on “love, sharing and family values”.[2]
I try and maintain an awareness of the tug fast food has an me, and yet I still
find myself craving a coke for no apparent reason. We aren’t that strong, and
it’s not ridiculous to suggest we need support at an institutional level
against free market-driven poor dietary habits.
***
Fox News is the loudest voice espousing individual
responsibility and free market supremacy. You don’t have to watch it for very
long to realise that its every viewpoint rests upon absolute faith in
individual responsibility. All the mindless froth – the racism, the
warmongering, the anti-healthcare etc – becomes so much clearer when seen in this
light. Bill O’Reilly, the angry face of Fox News, isn’t stupid, he just has an
unwavering belief that every American is absolutely responsible for their own
actions. A year ago, perhaps, I might have watched Bill shout down a leftie and
seen an unexplainable evil, an aversion to rationality and an empathy deficit,
but it sort of makes sense now. The things he holds dearest are his deeply-American
ideals of individual responsibility and the free market, and left-leaning
political thought by its very nature is an attack on that. He feels individual responsibility,
the cornerstone of his beliefs, is a very rational stance, and so
understandably gets very angry when it’s questioned. Of course, this viewpoint
isn’t limited to Fox News, and can be found across all the Murdoch press and
beyond on both sides of the Atlantic.
As one of the United States’ closest allies, Britain is more
vulnerable than anyone to the spread of American corporate hegemony. The
erosion of the NHS, our most precious institution, is a result of overly
powerful private enterprise. Also under threat is the prison system (which the
US has managed to turn into a business (see: the war on drugs)), and already
lost are the post and rail services. From a business perspective, the NHS is a
barrier to a profitable healthcare industry as found in the States, and so must
be dismantled or bought out. The pro-business Conservatives with Margaret “there
is no such thing as society” Thatcher as their guiding light, are proponents of
a system disposed towards privatisation, while UKIP are overtly in favour of
it. A further layer of dismay is found with the realisation that the free
market model drives up obesity rates with irresistible sugary delights while
also hovering up the resultant profits when unhealthy people seek medical
attention.
The second “prong” is an ideological one, held by people who
see state healthcare as a contravention of the ideology of self-reliance. Why
should I have to pay for someone that can’t look after themselves? The answer,
of course, is that it is perfectly possible to fall into unfortunate
circumstances through no fault of one’s own. But individual responsibility
blinds them to this. The American Dream is that anyone can succeed if they work
hard enough. This may be true, but it doesn’t mean everyone can succeed; in fact, it ensures some will reach the top
of the ladder just as others are kicked off the bottom. The right sees the
homeless as failed individuals, the left sees the homeless as a symptoms of a
failing society.
Similarly, racism is also entrenched by individual
responsibility. Black people generally do worse financially and commit more
crimes than white people, and individual responsibility makes it so easy to
place the blame for criminal behaviour on black people themselves, who are
obviously too stupid to have the wherewithal to get a good education and move
to the suburbs. There is no – and there can be no – consideration for the
social contexts of a person’s life, and the outside influences and structures
that set them down an unfortunate path. There’s no space for empathy in Bill
O’Reilly’s world of total autonomy.
The environment is another battleground of individual
responsibility. While there are a few fringe idiots who genuinely believe the
environment is fine and that nothing needs to be done, the bulk of the heavy
lifting is done by corporations who realise that green laws would have a
negative impact on their bottom line. This is a serious threat to our continued
existence as a species, and it’s perpetuated purely by greed. This is maybe the
most obvious instance of the damaging influence of the free market. What can
the government do when anyone who makes a genuine attempt to crack down on pollution
would be smeared as an enemy of all that is American?
***
Where is the line? If ten is total individual responsibility
and zero is no responsibility for our actions whatsoever, which number is the
key to a successful and equal society? I don’t know. It’s a mix of the two, but
exactly where I have no idea.
The 2011 London Riots are a good case study. There were two
commonly-expressed point of views: one that said the rioters are simply terrible
people and that it doesn’t take much self-control to not burn down a shop and
steal things; while the other said it was a failing at a societal level, and
that the rioters were a group of the marginalised poor, excluded from a capitalist
system that constantly reminds them of the virtues of consumerism, who eventually
cracked and robbed expensive shoes from shops. I can see both sides.
Consumerist tendencies, I imagine, grow even in people without the money to
participate, and I can see how that might become intolerable…but at the same
time, don’t smash, burn and steal, Christ, it’s not that hard.
An admission about me: I’m pretty disdainful of fat people.
I think obesity is a reflection of a lack of self-control, and a drain on
public services. While I’m not enough of a dick to “fat shame” anyone, I’m not
overly sympathetic either. But on the other hand, I have all the advantages a
man can have to remain in shape. My mum only ever buys quality ingredients and
doesn’t shirk on the veggies, and has taught me to cook healthily too. We’ve
never made a habit of eating takeaways or fast food. I’m also, modesty aside
for a second, athletically gifted so have always enjoyed sport, enough so that
I still enjoy training rigorously five times a week. So it’s easy for me - I'm accutely aware of how arrogant this may sound but when it comes to health, you could say I was born into the 1%. Honestly, I do feel blind to the struggles some people go through to lose weight. I don’t know
what it’s like for people raised in an environment less conducive to good
health. But at least with this perspective I have some insight into the rarefied air of the plutocracy.
I think these are good examples that illustrate the
difficulty in treading the correct line. My own instincts are towards a 6.5-7.5
out of 10 – we have control over ourselves in the moment, but our environment-driven
subconscious may push us down certain paths without our conscious brain
realising.
As for what I would do were in charge: I would protect the
NHS and the prison system against a corporate buyout in a constitution (I think
we need a constitution), and re-nationalise the train network and university
system. I would criminalise lobbying of any kind. I would close the loophole that allows
companies to escape corporation tax. I would ban companies that operate from
tax havens from accessing the market. I’m not bothered by the idea that
taxation might drive private capital away, societal balance is more important.
I’d ask George Monbiot to sort out environmental issues.
***
To close, a bit about films in the context of individual
responsibility:
One of the (many) reasons Cloud Atlas is my favourite film
of the past five years is because it preaches notions of an interconnected
humanity. Near the end, one of the film’s heroes rejects his businessman father-in-law’s
invitation to join his company to be part of a social movement. It’s worth quoting
in full:
Haskel
Moore: There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do
not fare well. This movement will never survive; if you join them, you and your
entire family will be shunned. At best, you will exist a pariah to be spat at
and beaten – at worst, to be lynched or crucified. And for what? For what? No
matter what you do it will never amount to anything more than a single drop in
a limitless ocean.
Adam Ewing:
What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?
The idea that one might be content being a humble part of a
larger whole flies in the face of the idea preached by the right that everyone
is the protagonist of their own story. The six main characters are all rewarded
for helping others – sometimes in obvious ways, and sometimes in abstract ways.
Adam Ewing’s life is saved by a black slave stowaway he helped find acceptance
amongst the crew; Luisa Rey, aided by a number of allies, uncovers an oil
industry conspiracy; Timothy Cavendish’s greed and self-absorption leads to imprisonment
by a corporate nursing home that operates above the law, which he only escapes
by helping and conspiring with his fellow man; Sonmi-451 is trapped in a corporate
totalitarian world and is executed for trying to aid a rebellion, but her insight
results in her accidental deification; and Zachry is helped by Sonmi’s wisdom
to overcome his self-preservation instinct, enabling the continued existence of
humanity. (Okay, hands up, I can’t really think how Frobisher fits into this to be
honest!)
On the other hand…
The cinematic landscape is saturated with superheroes – paragons
of individual responsibility – who carry the fate of the world on their
shoulders. They are unwavering in their beliefs and uncorruptible to outside
influences. Tony Stark uses his genius entrepreneurialism to leverage the free
market and develop an ultimate weapon that saves the world from evil. The
people at Marvel aren’t naïve. They know these aren’t simple stories about a
few amazing people doing amazing things, but embodiments of the ideology that underpins the free market. There’s a reason these films are being churned out by the
dozen at the moment and films like Cloud Atlas are forced to seek independent
(mostly European) funding: films are not inert. The producers have political
ideals and business interests, and shape their movies to reflect and perpetuate
them.
It’s quite difficult to think of good examples of accessible,
enjoyable left wing cinema. Attack the
Block is one. We are introduced to our heroes when they mug a nurse – a pretty
white woman who we naturally empathise with. The leader, Moses, plays the role
of both protagonist and criminal at the same time. However, by the end of the
film we learn that Moses’ life circumstances – his absentee parents, the
pressures of being leader of a gang, the poverty of the titular block he lives in – conspire
to push him down a path of petty crime, from which he is able to rise heroically, saving his friends. He’s not a bad person, he just isn’t immune to external
pressure.
And the last word to, naturally (I can’t resist, I’m sorry I
just can’t), In Bruges. Harry, the
film’s antagonist, is bad because he applies his outwardly perfectly reasonable mantra of
“don’t hurt kids” too rigidly, without compromise and with no space for
context. He has no sympathy for a suicidal and repentant Ray, and eventually
dies by his own hand when he blows Jimmy’s head off – had he taken context into
account he would have discovered Jimmy is an adult dwarf and there was no reason to kill himself. I see this as similar
to how Bill O’Reilly applies his mantra of individual responsibility too
rigidly, allowing it to twist and distort him into a monster, despite a recognisable
logic to his viewpoint.
