Last week, the Toronto Star published an article entitled “A Nation of Cheaters”, outlining our general refusal to prioritize honest, hard work over the Darwinian drive to “get ahead”. Reporter David Graham gives example after example of what Jean Paul Sartre would term bad faith, the cowardly and metaphysically unfounded practice of saddling anything and anyone else with the burden of one’s own actions. Point by point, the article describes our communal allergy to personal responsibility.
Coincidentally, I was having a week riddled with bad faith. A customer service rep on the phone followed the phrase “The part you need for your stove won’t be in until April” with “What do you expect us to do about it?” A drycleaner who made a perfectly good shirt vanish into the ether substituted a twenty-dollar bill for an apology. I was dealing with my regular onslaught of students claiming I was ruining their academic and professional future by not accepting their work three weeks late. In my head, I could picture Sartre, with his bad eye and his ever-present halo of cigarette smoke, shaking his head. There are weeks when I feel like an incredible sap for assuming that I’m responsible for my own actions, and an even bigger sap for hoping that others will share my views.
Graham’s article proposes that while outbreaks of irresponsibility are recurrent, they’re generally short-lived. I’m hopeful, but not all that optimistic. It’s really very comforting to put our responsibilities in a cute little bubble, float it away, and wait for it to explode (messily) over someone else’s head. Moreover, rewards for self-determination aren’t very tempting. Being willing to accept responsibility puts us at the bottom of the hill, the same steep climb down which the proverbial brown stuff rolls. Being at the receiving end of bad faith, having all of the non-believers taking numbers and lining up to pin their woes on you makes it difficult to avoid the temptation to utter “It’s not my fault either”.
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1 comment:
I couldn't agree more with your critique. What an interesting article! Why can't everyone soak in praise of their good efforts and wholeheartedly ignore any negative fallback of their errors?
We should all be so blessed.
Even more interesting is the root of this discrepancy.. which of these behaviours is a sign of ignorance and which an indication of intelligence? Or can it boil down to a simple statement of nature versus nurture. Is this allergy to responsability simply a result of the trend to move away from giving honest critique. Perhaps the current emphasis on being entirely "constructive" and correct is making it impossible for us to accept our faults. Maybe we'd all be healthier realizing our limitations rather than placing all the emphasis on good and improvable traits. To take a cynical standpoint - we can't all be perfect and successful.
Perhaps that's why Sartre smoked. Do you think that through his unapologetic embrace of his own human weakness he was able to showcase his own brilliance? Unfortunately it doesn't look as if evolution was in his favour.
C'est la vie.
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