The dark side of the call to responsibility6 reading minutes

Getting vaccinated? An act of «responsibility»! Just like turning down your thermostat to 19°, stopping flying or cutting down on meat consumption. The rhetoric of the call to responsibility, omnipresent today, conceals a dark side.

Liberalism has always been based on the freedom-responsibility principle. We are reminded of the cult line popularized by the films Spiderman Marvel Studios: «With great power comes great responsibility.» Freedom is certainly a great power: the power to do «what we want». If enjoyed indiscriminately, it can become harmful. Hence the importance of responsibility, conceived as a freely consented limitation of one's own freedom in certain circumstances. Responsibility presupposes freedom. Without freedom, there is no responsibility. You can't do away with one without doing away with the other.

The daily use of the term ’irresponsibility« in the media to designate a whole range of behaviors shows the notion's great symbolic significance in our minds. To be labelled irresponsible is extremely unpleasant and demeaning. Political communication specialists are well aware of this. So much so, in fact, that appeals to responsibility and accusations of irresponsibility are among the most popular language used by today's governing classes.

Covid, energy, climate...

The Covid crisis is a case in point. Despite sometimes cacophonous and contradictory policies and measures, the call for responsibility was a constant theme in government communications during the crisis. The Swiss example is no exception. On March 20, 2020, when he decreed semi-confinement, Health Minister Alain Berset appealed to the Swiss people's sense of responsibility. In February 2022, at the time of the gradual lifting of all restrictive measures, his successor as President of the Confederation, Ignazio Cassis, made a philosophically literary remark: «The light is well and truly on the horizon [...] But more freedom also means more responsibility.»

In February 2022, Russia decided to attack Ukraine. Europe retaliated by choosing to do without Russian gas. In anticipation of the risk of energy shortages during the winter of 2022-2023, due in part to this economic sanction, a new version of the appeal to responsibility was born: it had become «irresponsible» to consider heating your home above 19° or leaving too many light bulbs on. For the same reasons, Federal Councillor Simonetta Sommaruga thought it appropriate to recommend showers for two!

In 2023, in France, we'll be playing the score again with drinking water. A recent example, Le Parisien headlined on May 28, following statements by the French Minister for Ecological Transition: «Swimming pools: is it really irresponsible to have a pool? More generally, it's the whole issue of climate and ecology that is now being treated through the prism of irresponsibility. To oppose the ecologists on any point of their program is to incur the trial of irresponsibility!

The end of responsibility

Calling for responsibility is not absurd, far from it. Allowing individuals the freedom to assume the consequences of their choices is the opposite of infantilization, and protects society from the authoritarian impulses of the state. However, the rhetoric of responsibility, as it is used today, is more often than not used to accompany or justify the implementation of policies that tend to be authoritarian and detrimental to freedoms. We no longer say «Be responsible», but rather «Be responsible, or we'll be forced to make you responsible». It's the new version of TINA (There Is No Alternative). In short, the call for responsibility has been transformed into a particularly offensive form of political correctness, if by this we mean succeeding in discrediting a priori certain opinions or actions.

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Authoritarian measures and responsibility are totally incompatible. The former restrict or even prevent the exercise of freedom, which is a prerequisite for the latter. sine qua non of the latter. Today, responsibility often consists in forcefully complying with the political will of the moment. When we are told that we may have to accept tomorrow, by responsibility, The idea of tracking our «carbon footprint», the result of which could be to restrict some of our freedoms, such as the freedom to fly, is clearly in bad faith! It's not a question of responsibility, but of restricting freedom.

There's nothing wrong with dreaming of such a society. What is dishonest, however, is to prepare for its advent by increasingly mobilizing the call for responsibility, which masks the true nature of a society of generalized surveillance. When every behavior is regulated and eventually calls for a reward or, on the contrary, a retaliatory measure, the State becomes a kind of parent who treats citizens not as responsible individuals, but as children to be educated.

Commentary | When conspiracy becomes reality

On June 5, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced the launch of a global vaccine passport project based on the European Union's (EU) Covid passport technology used during the pandemic. An article in TF1info explains the idea behind this program: «to draw on the experience of the EU, which developed a European health pass during the pandemic, so that a similar tool can be extended to the rest of the world this time.»

It's worth noting that as soon as vaccine passport systems were introduced to combat Covid-19, many voices were raised to denounce the risk of generalizing this tool to other diseases and other contexts. These voices were conveniently disqualified, accused of conspiracy. Should we conclude from this that conspiracy is the voice of reason? Certainly not! On the contrary, the fight against conspiracy, or anti-complotism, reveals here its darker side: that of another form of political correctness which, in the name of defending the truth, actually leads to the discrediting of the truth. a priori certain positions and undermine the foundations of informed debate.

Write to the author: antoine.bernhard@leregardlibre.com

You have just read an analysis - exceptionally in free access - taken from our dossier INFANTILIZATION, published in Le Regard Libre N°98.