#5. Responsibility
This text, shedding light on the different meanings of responsibility and its inescapable role in our lives, will take you about 5 minutes to read.
The key to understanding responsibility — what it is, how it works, and how problems pertaining to it are solved — lies in distinguishing between two very different, yet conjoined, meanings of the phrase "to be responsible".
On one hand, "to be responsible" means "to act in a certain way". On the other hand, "to face the consequences." In some cases, both understandings mean the same thing: if Bob is entrusted with caring for a ficus, and he waters it, weeds it, and in general cares for it, he's responsible in both ways. He is facing the consequences of his actions, in this case, positive ones, which means he's complimented on the way he managed the ficus. And he is acting in a particular manner that we call "responsible", the one we imply when we say things like "I want a responsible partner", or "you should be more responsible".
On the other hand, the situation changes dramatically, revealing the abyss of complexity of understanding responsibility, when Bob fails to care for the ficus and gets punished. Now - is he responsible? Well, no, in the sense that he didn't act in the way we imply when we say someone is a responsible person. But in another way, yes, since he was held accountable and punished, wasn't that just another form of responsibility?
To understand the intricacy of this distinction, let's differentiate between proactive responsibility and passive responsibility. This way, it's easier to tell if Bob is responsible: he clearly isn't proactively responsible, but he's still passively responsible, since a punishment has been inflicted. That meaning, the passive responsibility is also known as accountability, but to avoid complicating the discussion and to get to the point I want to make, we won't distract ourselves with that for now.
So, let's set some definitions:
Proactive responsibility is a caring behavior by the proactively responsible person, aimed at the best outcome for the object of responsibility.
Passive responsibility is subjecting one's quality of life to change in correlation with the state of the object of responsibility.
In other words, if you're getting rewarded or punished for the state of something, that's passive responsibility. If you are putting effort into supporting something, you're proactively responsible.
How does that help us? Well, first of all, you can clearly see that the two types of responsibility aren't equal. For one, one of them treats you like an object of external forces, while the other implies your agency. But more importantly, proactive responsibility is inherently just a reaction to the passive one. The only reason Bob would care for the ficus is that he'd like to be rewarded, or at least wouldn't like to be punished.
That might seem overly cynical, as if Bob couldn't care for the poor plant out of the goodness of his heart. But that perspective loses sight of the fact that conforming to one's values is also a reward, and breaking them is a punishment. Nowhere in the definition is it said that reward or punishment must come from outside. Realising he failed to uphold a task bestowed upon him might be the only punishment Bob would get, but that's punishment nonetheless.
The next thing you can notice is that you can swap one of those responsibilities for the other. When given a ficus to care for, Bob doesn't magically get an unbreakable duty of caring for it. He's free to choose whether he'd prefer to care for the plant, or focus on other things and face the consequences of his neglect should they ever come. In fact, that kind of choice between being proactively or passively responsible is one we often have to make: the resources of psyche and life in general are limited, but responsibilities might not be. So when overwhelmed by work, studies, family, health, romantic issues, and finances, people have a grim choice to make - which responsibilities to approach proactively, and which to leave to be passive, dropping the ball and preparing to face the music.
In fact, that choice, or, more precisely, the right to make it, is a huge part of psychodynamic work. People often view responsibility as a duty they have no choice but to fulfill proactively. I must care for others, or my family members, colleagues, or superiors will think I'm a bad person. The notion that getting the "bad daughter/son/wife/husband/employee/boss" label is a viable option, and you can accept it, bearing the passive responsibility, but getting rid of the proactive one is a big step towards internal freedom and, ironically, a proactively responsible approach to caring for oneself.
But there is a bigger fish to fry in the depths of understanding responsibility. It's elusive, camouflaging, and doesn't want to be brought to light, hiding behind the "victim-blaming" label. It's the notion that people are unavoidably responsible for their own lives.
The key part here is "unavoidably". Since we defined passive responsibility as "subjecting one's quality of life to change in correlation with the state of the object of responsibility," passive responsibility for one's life isn't even a conclusion; it's a tautology. If your life gets worse, then, well, your life gets worse. Your life is infinitely correlated with itself, which means you're by definition passively responsible for it. And while it might seem like a trivial idea at face value, people tend to forget about it very quickly when there's someone else's responsibility to mention.
Jack has been mean to me, says Jill, so my bad mood is his responsibility. And while that might be true - if they are in a relationship, and Jill's mood affects Jack's quality of life, that does make him at least passively responsible, and if he's good at foreseeing that passive responsibility, it is reasonable to expect that he might show some proactive responsibility as well. But what's more important here is that Jill is also responsible for her own mood. If she doesn't do anything to improve it, she will be the one suffering. And no amount of Jack's parallel suffering from her bad mood will change it.
That's the trickiest part: we are prone to thinking about responsibility as a physical object. If there exists 100% of responsibility for something, and Jill has given Jack half of it, 50%, then she's left with the other half, a mere 50%, not 100%. And if she attributed Jack 100% - then she's not responsible at all! But that's not how responsibility works, not according to our definitions, it doesn't. Giving someone partial or even complete responsibility for something doesn't alleviate it from you.
Let's say you're the one who gave Bob the ficus. And Bob asked his roommate to care for it, since Bob is bad with plants. Now, if Bob's roommate spoils the ficus, Bob can blame him seven ways till Sunday, but that won't change a thing about your reaction in his direction. You will hold Bob responsible, so his responsibility didn't diminish one bit by sharing it with someone else. Hell, this chain could go as far as you want - Bob's roommate could've asked his girlfriend, and she could've asked her mother, and she could've asked her neighbour, etc. However, each request and level of delegation created new responsibilities, rather than subtracting from previous ones. One person can be blamed for the fate of the ficus, or multiple in a sequence, that doesn't change Bob's fate, and thus, doesn't change his responsibility.
So what does that mean in counseling practice? Yes, your parents, your friends, your social network, the state of politics and economy of your country, and random criminals you've had the misfortune to meet did, and do affect your quality of life. You're well within your rights to hold them responsible for the effect they have on you. Actually, you should do exactly that, and that's a big part of taking care of oneself, i.e., being proactively responsible for oneself. But - and here's the kicker - none of that relieves you of your own responsibility for yourself.
It's not fair, it's not just, there's nothing right about you being responsible for fixing your life after others have done their best to break and poison it. But there's no way around it. Your passive responsibility for your life is inescapable due to the very nature of responsibility. Therefore, it is advisable to approach this responsibility proactively, caring for your life, rather than expecting those who've wronged you to come and fix it.
Until next week,
Konstantin Kunakh
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