Responsibility will be sought on the street

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A serious problem with virtues is that we all always like them, and sometimes demand them, in others, but we like it much less when we have to develop them in ourselves and apply them in our everyday life. The clearest example of this can be responsibility.

We all love relaxation youth, trips, drunkenness and the feeling that nobody and nothing depends on us, that nothing crucial will change if we forget something or are late somewhere. Having no responsibility is a relief. The only problem is that this is only possible if someone else carries it for us, and this balance is one of the crucially important issues in life.

Carrying responsibility is not nearly as difficult as carrying it. As always, the beginning is the most difficult - starting school, the first bills to be paid on time, taking care of the first child... Most people manage to practice it and, after some time, can do it routinely. Almost no one enjoys responsibilities, we all like periods without them, sometimes we enjoy passing them on to someone else. But you also live with them, even in spite of them.

FROM OUTER TO INNER VOICE

It is also possible to understand how it all begins. The Serbian language tells us that the basis of responsibility is the feeling that we are answerable to someone for something, and the same is true in many other languages. And it really starts like that in childhood. There is some "higher instance", someone who has the right to ask us questions - "Why didn't you do what you promised?", "Where is your homework?" – and before whom we usually feel fear, shame or remorse. The period before these questions are installed and automated is called carefree, and it is usually over already in the lower grades of elementary school.

Responsibility can be clearly present already in early childhood. If the child is left alone, the parents are absent or self-absorbed, someone in the family is chronically ill, the younger children are conspicuously independent, one of the children begins to carry a burden both for himself and for someone else (or others). Although this may seem positive or even a feat, and the child itself may feel proud because of it, it is actually an indicator of family dysfunction and neglect of the child, and the price he pays is usually high and is reflected in the difficulty of getting in touch with his own feelings, mostly anger.

Others, on the other hand, break responsibility easily or avoid it at all costs, as we can see from their attitude towards school or cooperation, when choosing a profession, approach to starting a family, perseverance, capacity to set up long-term pipelines...

How someone positions himself according to responsibility clearly shows us how the process of building his inner world went. Everything revolves around the question of who we answer to, who we are responsible for. In the beginning, that instance is outside of us (parent, teacher, coaches) and when it is not in our sight, we do our own thing. Over time, however, we begin to hear their "do your homework first, then you'll play" echo in us even when we're alone. The only question is how deeply it will be embedded in us and whether it will be possible to "uproot" it, at least in adolescence.

FLEE OR ATTACK

Some people also feel a responsibility that goes beyond this level, but originates from even higher spheres. In certain cases, it is related to community, nation, human race, sometimes to all living world, abstract principles or metaphysical domains. This sense of responsibility can be deeper and more permanent than the previously mentioned ones, but it is often a reflection of conformity or fashionism.

In a more psychological sense, responsibility rests on several different capacities. The first among them is most likely that we can keep the activity or the person we are responsible for as long as necessary in our mind - not to forget about them, not to neglect them, not to expect someone else to do our task. Just as everyone sometimes "distracts" something, it is possible to notice that it happens to some people often and/or even when it comes to extremely delicate obligations. Second in line is the capacity to withstand pressure. Again, we all know how easy it is to "lose your head" when a possible mistake could have fatal outcomes - expectations are huge, many eyes are on you, you are in a final exam or someone very important to you is involved. In those moments, some of us give up, panic or run away, while others can't wait for the opportunity to "lead the last attack".

In American English, this is called integrity of personality. Pressures and blows do not break someone, he keeps his word even when it is difficult to do so, his morality depends much more on internal principles and strength than on other people's expectations and demands. This, of course, is often idealized (and screened) in situations where one bears responsibility for someone weaker than oneself or completely helpless.

INSTITUTIONS LIKE A DAM

The gradation of responsibility should also be quite obvious. We look more closely at a four-year-old than a fourteen-year-old child, and we expect a twenty-four-year-old person not only to be responsible for himself but also, at least sometimes, to take on part of our responsibilities. Some relationships are problematic when someone does not accept the appearance of such a gradation (say, an overprotective parent who is not ready for the child's independence), and others when it appears suddenly (for example, due to a chronic illness of an adult).

In law-based societies, more authority means more responsibility. People who choose to fight for positions of power usually know that just one mistake, and not necessarily a tragic one, can destroy their entire career. Think of all the coaches who resigned because of one defeat, or the German foreign minister who held office for only a few weeks, until it was discovered that he had plagiarized his doctorate (despite the fact that, according to the then chancellor, he was not elected to the government to write PhDs). One mistake is enough for mature public opinion to lose faith in the fact that you will not make mistakes often.

Some remember on their own, some need to be reminded, but the most important thing is that developed societies develop and protect independent institutions to restrain those who believe that power will protect them from any responsibility. Whether it's university accreditation commissions, the limitation of holding office to two mandates, the independence of the prosecution and the judiciary, or anonymous reviews of scientific works and artistic auditions, the entire order of a society rests on independent institutions. The reason for this is simple: power is a heavy intoxicant that very few people can resist without serious outside help.

Unfortunately, we become convinced of this only when a tragedy occurs. As I write this, we are all shaken by the deaths that occurred in Novi Sad (and it is pointless for me to convince anyone that this text was planned at least six weeks ago). The only reason why they happened is the lack of control mechanisms and independent institutions, i.e. the necessary result of that in the form of unlimited corruption and negative selection. Those directly responsible have not resigned and explain that they have nothing to do with that "event". Actually, I suppose, they are just trying to gain time, so that this horror would not be forgotten, knowing that they have already made all the institutions meaningless and that there is no one who could bring them to justice, as there has never been before. Their responsibility will have to be sought again on the street because it is clear to everyone that there is no institutional way. For every society, this is a "clinical picture" so black that it can hardly be black.

In the realm of politics is the question of whether there is collective responsibility for what the representatives of a group have done (or for what they have not done). A strange phenomenon related to this is our tendency towards selectivity: when athletes win a medal, we say “that's it smo broke them”; when a politician takes us around the world, "I never even voted for him"; when it turns out that the services of our country have carried out some massacre, in a neighboring country or on the other side of the planet, "I never even heard of it".

A narrative in which avoiding responsibility is completely impossible is one that has gone to the opposite extreme, and from the consequences of which we see that some relief from responsibility is always needed. The "inherited" responsibility of the Christian, most emphatically Catholic, belief in "original" sin, which we are born with and which we carry before we even learn to breathe, is for many a heavy burden and a source of lifelong overload, even frequent criticism and/or occasional self-punishment.

We can understand the full meaning and significance of responsibility only through its relation to freedom. Namely, there is no freedom without the willingness and strength to take responsibility, which is why many people renounce both, and prefer to remain passive and dependent (for example, they live with their parents well into adulthood). Responsibility also limits freedom, as we perceive that our freedom can become an invasion of another's privacy or dangerous to our health. Sometimes the responsibility of one person becomes the basis of the freedom of another, and, ideally, these roles can be replaced. However, the greatest joy of responsibility lies in the feeling that the freedom it brings us has been won, my freedom, which we do not owe to anyone, so we especially enjoy it and can be proud of it. Even if it was only that, it would be worth developing a sense of responsibility in yourself and supporting it in others.

The author is a psychologist