By Pack Wilbur
Created with AI
Every day I see our government doing things that I think are wrong. Our most senior leaders lie to us repeatedly and in ways that are transparently obvious. This is not new. I think it is far worse now than ever before. And the lies support actions that are often deliberately cruel and destructive.
So, what is our own personal responsibility?
Aristotle defined a citizen as one who “shares in the ruling and being ruled in turn.” [1] That does not make any individual voter a president, a senator, or a general; nor is responsibility ever equal. But it means citizenship is participation, not spectatorship.
Politics is never wholly someone else’s actions. If harm is caused then, in some sense, we must all be guilty. But, as Hannah Arendt objects, if guilt is seen as spread equally over everyone, we grow morally lazy, “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” [2] Her point is that we have a moral responsibility to know what is being done, to describe it without euphemism, and to withdraw support when support becomes complicity.
Citizens need not issue orders or pull triggers to be implicated in public wrongs.
They are implicated by informed endorsement, by willful ignorance, by partisan excuse-making, by deciding that the suffering of strangers is of no consequence. They are implicated too, by prioritizing personal benefits – lower taxes, smaller government, cultural or religious affirmation, and the comfort of belonging to a particular group.
The citizen who was right to question the drone strikes that killed suspects without trial under one administration is bound by the same standard to question the boat strikes that do it under the next. We remember the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Libya, each of which killed people who had no say in it. Anyone who sees the harm only when the other side holds the trigger has confused a tribe for a conscience.
None of this demands purity. No state acts in perfect innocence, and politics is full of tragic tradeoffs. The duty is not to keep our hands clean in an unclean world. It is to refuse to call evil necessity, convenience prudence, or cruelty realism.
How are we each responsible?
Not for the policies, which will divide us as they always have, but for the duty underneath them. None of this requires that we be guilty. It requires that we be citizens. It asks that we be informed, that we know what is done in our name and not look away because the knowing is uncomfortable. That we say so, plainly, when it is wrong, even when our own side is doing it. That we vote as though the consequences are ours, because they are. And that we press for repair while repair is still possible.
____________________________________________________________________________
[1] Aristotle, Politics, Book III, on the citizen as one who shares in ruling and being ruled in turn.
[2] Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003).