Accountability

When people use the word "accountability," they're generally talking about other people suffering the unpleasant consequences of choices of which the speaker disapproves. Basically, when they say they want "accountability," what they mean is that they want people to be punished. But it seems to me that there's another side to that equation. If bad choices should inevitably lead to unpleasant consequences, then good choices should inevitably lead to pleasant ones. I have not found this to be the case.

Conservatives--the people I most often hear calling for accountability for individuals--would respond that if an action didn't pan out, that is ipso facto evidence that it was a bad choice. But if that's true, then most of what we're advised by conservatives is, in fact, very bad advice. Pretty much everything a minister will preach at you in church is setting you up for failure.

Be kind, and the emotionally needy will latch onto you and demand all your attention. 

Be forgiving, and those who hurt you will do it repeatedly, because you've demonstrated to them that you're a safe target.

Be generous, and your resources will quickly be depleted.

Be loyal, and you will be taken for granted.

Be contrite, and you'll be punished.

Be honest, and people will take offense.

Be principled, and you will alienate all who don't share your values. 

Work hard, and you will get exhausted. Work long, and the hours of your life will disappear.

Be humble, and your accomplishments will be overlooked.

Be agreeable, and your needs will be ignored.

But do the opposite of any of these, and you will be despised and distrusted. So it would appear that neither being nice nor being nasty will necessarily lead to getting what you want.

Profit is not about virtue. Neither being virtuous nor being vicious will necessarily lead to gain, because gain isn't about that. It's divorced from any notion of ethics. It's just math. You find a thing, you take it, you have it. Maybe people will love you for it or maybe they will hate you. More likely, some will love you and some will hate you, or they'll all do one and then the other, given time.

But ideas like, "Work hard to please your boss, and he will reward you with raises and bonuses," simply aren't true. It might happen, if, just through some weird twist of psychology, he happens to want to. But most likely, he won't. It isn't logical for him to do so. If you're already providing maximum service at your present wage, he has no need to incentivize you with higher wages. He can already get everything he wants and more out of you for what he's currently paying. You thought he'd just feel socially obligated to give more because you're giving more? There's certainly no legal requirement for him to pay more. It's bad business to spend more on costs than is necessary, and labor is a cost. Yes, he'll be happy you're so easy to take advantage of, and that might put him in a better mood, but it's not going to result in a fatter paycheck for you.

On the other hand, if you take the opposite approach, always holding back, always demanding more, always enforcing your boundaries and not letting your boss have anything he didn't expressly pay for, then he's going to resent you. At the first opportunity, he'll replace you with someone cheaper and more compliant. 

You see? There is no formula for winning in that situation, because the whole aim of the employer is to exploit you for profit. You can no more "win" at being employed than you can win at being robbed. Whether you go along with it or fight it every step of the way will change your experience of it, but it won't ever change the outcome so radically that you end up coming out on top. There simply is no correlation between what your attitude as an employee is and which one of you gets the profit at the end of the day. Employees who think they can change that by changing how they act at work are like a gambling addict thinking he can tip the odds in his favor instead of the casino's by changing his grip on the slot machine's handle.

And so it is with most other types of material acquisition. Whether you build a thing or steal it or have it given to you as a gift by adoring admirers or brutally force others to build it for you, the final balance is that you have it. Materialism is amoral. Not immoral. Morality simply has nothing to do with it.

It could be argued, I suppose, that if you're spending your time and attention on material acquisition, you may be ignoring the needs of others and not acting altruistically. But that argument could be easily countered by the fact that those who gain the most have the most to share. 

I think, when we feel hurt by injustice and call for accountability, very often--maybe not always, but often--what we're really feeling hurt by is that someone was rewarded for breaking rules that existed only in our heads. If, to use the example above, you as an employee believe that your boss is some kind of vending machine where the more you feed a happy, accommodating attitude and hard work into it, the more you'll get out, you'll end up disappointed and resentful. You'll feel like there was a social contract--I do this for you, and you do this for me--and that, since you gave extra, the boss was obliged to give extra. Except he wasn't. You just gave it away for free, trusting that the other party would be equally foolish. When the boss then doesn't fulfill your expectation of going above and beyond what was explicitly agreed to, then you feel like he broke a deal that was never actually made. You think he broke a rule, but the rule doesn't exist. 

In my observations, a lot of times when people are hurt and calling for accountability, this is what's going on. They think things should be a certain way. They think certain rules exist that don't. And then, when they discover the hard way that nobody else is playing by their secret rulebook, they cry "foul."

I could give more examples. This morning on the radio, right after an announcement that a deputy had been arrested for using excessive force, I heard that there's a protest where angry people are "demanding police accountability." An exasperated spokesperson for the police responded that they have so many levels of vetting, supervision, and review that he doesn't know how they could possibly be any more accountable. The problem there is that they're using different definitions of accountability, as well as different rule books. 

From the policeman's perspective, "accountability" means "Here are the rules spelled out letter for letter; if you violate them, you will be punished, and if you adhere to them, you will not be punished." His colleague broke the rules and was punished. He feels that his colleague has been held accountable. When he, himself, follows the rules, and yet the public calls for him to be punished anyway, he feels unjustly persecuted.

The protester has a loved one who attacked a cop. But from the protester's view, her loved one was not the bad guy. She feels that anything her loved one does is justifiable, because she loves him. The cop, in her view, doesn't even always count as human. It's a pest that gets in the way and is sometimes dangerous. Furthermore, the protester has had a steady diet of being told that she's a victim, that everyone who looks like her is a victim, that everyone she cares about is a victim, that being victims makes them The Good Guys, and that the police are the ones victimizing them, and are therefore The Bad Guys. In her rulebook, anytime a cop hurts someone she cares about, even if it was justified, even if it was in self-defense, the cop is wrong and should be punished for it. When that doesn't happen like clockwork, she's convinced that a grave miscarriage of justice has occurred, probably as part of some vast conspiracy to rig the whole system against her and the other people she sees as The Good Guys. 

This example has nothing to do with material gain and everything to do with ethics. We're talking about people causing each other bodily harm, and sorting out who was right and who was wrong. But both the cop and the protester, like the disappointed employee, feel that someone owed them something and didn't keep up their end of the deal.

The thing about accountability is that it's always something we demand of other people. You almost never hear someone demanding that others hold him more accountable, unless he's challenging them to test how reliable he is, or if he feels he needs others' help to steer him onto the right path. Normal people don't enjoy being punished. We seek to avoid pain. So escaping accountability gives us a feeling of relief. Escaping accountability gives us a feeling of freedom.
 

Once someone has tasted freedom, they feel entitled to it. People who've gotten away for a long time with being unaccountable feel like they have a right to be unaccountable. It doesn't matter where they are in the hierarchy. Whether we're talking about a mayor whose kids never get sentenced for drinking underage, or a petty thief who feels that shoplifting snacks is a human right, all these people feel like if they've gotten away with something repeatedly in the past, then they've somehow earned the privilege of getting away with it forever. When you then trap them and threaten them with punishment, they feel that they are the victims of injustice when the opposite is true.

If you make the mistake of browsing YouTube videos about dating and what people have to say about it, you'll be quickly overwhelmed by both videos of women who feel that their suitors owe them the world while they owe nothing in return, and videos of men who are angry because they feel that these women aren't following the rules. Both are playing by their own rulebooks, and are frustrated when engaging others who don't follow the same rules.

Culture long dictated the rules, but it carried limitations--obligations, which as we've covered, are restrictions on freedom. Accountability curtails freedom. 

It's funny...we paint both freedom and accountability in positive lights. "Freedom" gives us the image of someone on a mountaintop, deeply breathing fresh air, with a vast, untouched wilderness laid out in front of them, with nobody to tell them what to do. (Americans might also picture an American flag flapping in the background and an eagle screaming, but that's...weird. Being accountable to a huge, powerful government is the opposite of being free.) "Accountability" gives us images of justice and order and both good and bad people receiving what they deserve. We think of both of these things as good, but they're counter to each other. Freedom is getting away with doing whatever you want, and accountability means not getting away with it.

And when I say, "getting away with stuff," I don't just mean acts that are unethically harmful to another. It might just be that they conflict with the interests of another. You want the last piece of cake and so do I. There's no rule establishing that either of us is more entitled to it for any reason, and I get to it before you do. You feel hurt and resentful because I didn't offer it to you, or save it for you, or offer to split it with you--all rules that don't really exist.

Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the autism spectrum, or maybe it's because I've spent the last 20+ years in a multicultural family in a large, diverse, multicultural city, but whatever the reason, I find it difficult to navigate what other people's expectations will be. What one person demands, another will be offended by. You'd maybe think that clear communication would be the key to avoiding these misunderstandings, but you'd be wrong, because often, clear communication is one of the things that people are offended by. They sometimes (more often than you'd think) have taboos against saying explicitly what you mean. Acting without regard to taboos is freedom; it also leads to others demanding that you be held accountable. 

Where do we strike this balance between freedom and accountability? I think it's a more challenging question for people in the West, especially for progressives...at least thoughtful ones. In the East, and among conservatives in the West, there are pretty clearly spelled-out rules and expectations. Rigid cultures dictate exactly what your role is whether you like it or not, and things are supposed to go smoothly when everyone does what's expected of them. At least that's the plan. Progressives rebel against this. They flee the small towns and rural communities to conglomerate in big cities where nobody knows each other and the people come from a variety of cultural expectations. It's freedom! But then, with nobody accountable to anyone else, people run around exercising their freedom--their freedom to make noise in the middle of the night, or their freedom to help themselves to your possessions, or their freedom to shoot people who anger them, or their freedom to be rude in any number of ways. With all this freedom, you get a bunch of unrelated people whose only thing in common other than geography is that they all act without regard for each other. 

I think what it comes down to is that we all want freedom for ourselves and accountability for everyone else. The history of civilization is various peoples' attempts to negotiate how we figure out who gets how much of which. In some societies, they feel that everyone is entitled to equal amounts of both freedom and accountability. In others, they divide the people into cohorts--classes, castes, races, commoners and nobles, or what have you--and then decide which cohorts get how much freedom and how much accountability. 

Isn't it amazing that this is all the further we've gotten with that? We're still experimenting. We still haven't reached any consensus as a species on what the boundaries should be, what we all owe each other as the basic standard for what kind of behavior we find acceptable. It's stunning to me to see how very far away from reaching any such consensus we still are. I reckon that, if we survive long enough to ever get there, we'll then have to struggle with making the same negotiations with species from other worlds. But then again, maybe by then we'll have developed a good system for figuring it out.