Complicity and Responsibility

One of the questions that's always interested me is the question of complicity. For the past few hundred years, ever since the rise of democracy gave individuals a stake in political life, our social and political reality has in some ways depended on us. For example, in an obviously extreme case, phenomena like Nazism don't merely involve a leader imposing their rule on others, as might have been the case for feudal Kings. Instead, these regimes require that a significant part of the population buys into it, thereby becoming complicit. And this is a fundamental dynamic of democracy—we are, at some level, responsible for our reality.

I was reminded of all of this when reading a New York Times article about the low voter turnout in this country. For many Americans, voting for either candidate seems worse than not voting at all. And I think the explanation for this lies in the question of complicity. The lives of many people in this country are quite shitty, and voting for someone like Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump might mean that their lives are a little less shitty than they'd be otherwise. But, it would also mean that they're complicit in the shitiness of their lives in a way that they might not be if they simply refused to vote at all. And I think that many people don't get this.

For instance, following the last presidential election, there was a lot of shame that was dished out by Hillary supporters towards those who supported Bernie (even those who voted for Hillary in the general) and also towards those who didn't vote. And while it might feel good to shame people, there is an empirical and subjective reality that shame fails to understand. For many voters, not-voting, even if it meant Trump would win, was better than voting for Hillary. And I think that complicity helps explain this. If you're on the Titanic and hitting the Iceberg has become inevitable, voting for a new Captain is the height of self-delusion. Yes, maybe you'll just shear it instead of hitting it head on, but this boat's going down.

You might not like this reality and you might want to shame those who you feel are responsible. But the question of responsibility is an interesting one. What you take to be a lack of responsibility might actually be an attempt to take responsibility, while your own sense of responsibility might be the very irresponsibility that created this situation in the first place. Maybe I should call this the dialectic of responsibility.