I like the Spider-Man films (well, not the third one, but who does?) and have liked them since they came out. Bless my little heart, I liked the catch-phrase too: “With great power comes great responsibility.” It was inspiring to know that, at least in fiction, some right-hearted mutant was always on hand to fix problems. It’s certainly better than the alternative.
It wasn’t until recently, geologically speaking, that it occurred to me to question that idea. It seems fairly obvious on its face; if great power doesn’t come with great responsibility, then what does it come with? Great irresponsibility? No one wants that. Still, I wasn’t comfortable; it was time for me to obsess.
What is responsibility anyway? According to Merriam-Webster, it is “the quality or state of being responsible; moral, legal or mental accountability.” Responsibility, simply stated, is when an entity’s interaction with an object or action is a matter of duty — as opposed to power, where the relationship is simply a question of capability.
Responsibility may be viewed as a flipside of authority. The authority to create effects implies responsibility for those effects. Authority relies on ownership — ownership of the capacity to affect change, and ownership of the changes made.
Power is quite a separate concept from authority, though the two ideas ought to intimately correspond. Power is the capacity to create change. Authority is the right to create change. Power is an observation of what the world is. Authority is an observation of what the world ought to be.
There’s no mistaking the fact that this world is not quite right. There is plenty that needs to be fixed; in fact, there’s a whole industry set up around fixing the world business — it’s called politics. The main business of modern politics is to take responsibility for the problems of the people. From education to health care, from the environment to race relations, the people in politics have their work cut out for them.
So … why? Why do we assume that the salvation to most problems lies in the political arena? It’s an assumption we don’t really sit down and think about very often, but there must be a reason we hold it.
On the individual level, there has been a shift in our collective beliefs about decisions and perception. There is a tension between two bodies of thought; the older set of beliefs holds the individual to be an actor. The newer holds the individual to be an echo.
To be an actor is to inject something new into the world, to truly affect the flow of events. The central fact of the actor is the capacity to choose, to meaningfully decide, however small the area of effect.
Certainly, no individual exists in isolation; the beliefs, the values, the methods held by each of us are handed down and reinforced by the social and environmental structures in which we live. But the actor adds something else, a decision-making capacity that is external to and interprets these other influences.
If the actor is a creator, the echo is a recording. The echo is formed by those external beliefs and serves as a vehicle for their perpetuation. The echo is the sum of the forces applied. Both concepts are true in some measure, but which is properly dominant?
The consequences of these ideas are very broad. If people are actors then they possess some form of responsibility; their capacity for decision-making means that they originate something that did not before exist. If people are instead largely uncreative echoes, then their actions are merely the expression of forces that originate elsewhere, and for which, they have no specific responsibility.
If the individual is an echo, then where does responsibility lie? It is simple to assign blame to society, that source and vessel for all those creative forces, but it doesn’t do much good. How do you sit down and talk to “society?” How do you change its mind? And if you are yourself a part of that society, then you aren’t a second party at all. The whole experiment is simply an instance of society making faces in the mirror.
We often attempt to hold those evil vile corporations accountable for damaging our innocent manipulable minds, but why would a corporation be any more an actor than any other group of echoes? Even if we find a way to fix accountability to specific people, we still have to explain why the bad guys are capable of making decisions while the good guys aren’t. It is at this point that we turn to government.
If we cannot wield authority and make decisions for ourselves on an individual basis, we will turn to those who will do so on our behalf. To do so requires that we accept a few ideas:
1) There is nothing inherently valuable about making decisions for ourselves.
2) Government requires exceptional skill, because normal isn’t good enough.
3) Government requires exceptional power, because normal isn’t good enough.
4) Government constitutes a top-down imposition of solutions, because we are incapable of doing so ourselves.
5) While normal people can’t do these things for themselves, exceptional people will do them for everyone.
6) If they can’t … it’s because they don’t have enough power.
Can we really accept what this means about being a normal person? Can we trust others if we can’t trust ourselves? Is it right to give up our responsibilities — even if others can make better decisions than us?
The idea that “with great power comes great responsibility” is based on the assumption that needing powerful intervention is the normal and appropriate state of humanity. It is based on the assumption that responsibility is transferable. The assumption that the chronic need of heroes is just the way things should be. Are we really willing to accept that?
If not, perhaps the most responsible use of great power is not at all.