What
difference can I make, just little old me? There are so many good things we
could do that would only be effective if all or most of us did them – reducing car
and plane use or meat consumption for environmental reasons, voting in
elections, letting other people off the train before you try to get on,
queueing, calling people out on racism, sexism, ableism, etc. What’s the point
in doing these things if it’s just you doing them? You’re just a drop in the
ocean.
If
you’re nodding right now, what exactly do you think the ocean is made of?
There
is no other way to achieve these things, other than for individuals to do them.
If the only person you can influence is you, then the only thing you can do is
to do these things yourself. Otherwise they are impossible. And that’s clearly
not right, because they’d happen if everybody did them!
In
some cases of course, you can influence other people too. It would be the topic
of a different post to say how and when that should happen – no-one likes an
evangelist, but some issues have to be worth fighting or campaigning for
(politely, of course). But even if you can’t influence anyone, you can still do
your bit. The clue is in the phrase; it’s your
bit; no-one else can do that for you, so at the very least you should take
care of that.
The
problem, I think, is a total lack of a sense of collective responsibility. When
it comes to patriotism, or supporting a team, we are all in favour of having a
collective identity as a group – of being one component part of a larger body
with its own voice and its own views. But as soon as it comes to something more
substantial than just cheering – or sadly perhaps more often to booing others –
we suddenly don’t understand the idea of being part of a group any more. As
soon as it comes down to responsibility,
we become nothing more than isolated individuals, denying our connections to
others almost entirely. This makes no sense.
The
notion of collective responsibility is crucial. For one thing, the very idea of
democracy is founded on it. The people of a country elect their representatives.
That is the people as a whole do so.
That only happens because individual people go to the ballot box. How else
could it happen? Are we so arrogant that if our individual contribution can’t
be statistically significant, we deem it not worth making? “Give me ten votes,
or a hundred, then I’ll do it. I have
to be orders of magnitude more significant than everyone else, or I'm not even
going to bother”. Seriously?
Imagine
this: If you were a tourist at some really popular destination, somewhere you
knew had a constant stream of visitors, and they had an attraction where each
person had to lay a single brick as part of building a massive wall, would you
join in? I think most people would, especially once the first few bricks were
laid, and the results were beginning to show. In fact, I think most people
would love being part of something like that. We have it in us to be
collectively constructive, but we switch this skill off when it comes to social
responsibility.
It’s
time we did better on this. In fact, particularly where the environment is
concerned, it’s past time. If we get onto this straight away, we can limit the
damage somewhat, but by most estimates, that’s the best we can do. Where social
progress is concerned, we are at least moving in the right direction in many
respects now. Social media has played a real part in letting us see that many
individual contributions make a real collective that can cause real change.
Like the bricks in the wall, we have something visible and tangible to give us
hope.
The
challenge is in finding ways to visualise what we can achieve as a collective
for the spheres in which we do much less well – voter turn-out and the
environment in particular. If people can feel the bricks and see the wall (so
to speak), it might be easier to join the dots between individual action and
collective action. If individuals could see their own contributions in this
kind of way, there might be less temptation to say that you can do nothing.
This
does, of course, increase your sense of responsibility. But along with that
burden comes power, control over our shared future (which is your own future,
remember – this all works both ways), and a feeling of being part of something important.
Perhaps, to re-appropriate a slogan from the current government (they weren't
using it right anyway), we really are all in this together.
