There is something simultaneously scary and empowering about realising that there is nothing and nobody out there who is coming to ‘save’ us, and that this responsibility rests squarely on our shoulders. This is a responsibility to be eagerly embraced, even if it is costly.
This is something South Africans need to realise now that the political opposition has been decimated.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) campaigned on a platform to ‘rescue South Africa’ from a potential coalition between the African National Congress (ANC) and either the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) or uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). The DA then decided to govern as a junior partner alongside the ANC.
With the EFF and MK momentarily kept out of government, many people are nonetheless wondering who to vote for and support now when they wish to register their opposition to the ANC and its policies.
‘Who is going to rescue us now?’ one online poster asked in the days following the DA joining the so-called Government of National Unity, bringing the party’s 65-year stint in the opposition to an end.
This question revealed much about the mentality that democracy has saddled many South Africans with.
Three types of responsibility
There are, broadly, three senses of ‘responsibility.’
The first is responsibility as opposed to irresponsibility. This describes a personality trait, an attitude, which is associated with being considerate and prudent.
The second is being responsible as opposed to not being responsible. This effectively describes fault. To be responsible for something in this sense is to be the one who caused that thing to happen.
The third sense of responsibility can also be described as being responsible as opposed to not being responsible. But in this case, it does not describe fault, but a state of psychological ownership (as it were) of something.
Therefore, one might think that a rebellious teenager who drunkenly drives his parent’s car into a streetlamp and then shrugs his shoulders when the parent demands answers and an apology, has acted irresponsibly, and is responsible for the damage, but is not responsible in accepting accountability for his actions.
Similarly, a conscientious janitor at a supermarket acts responsibly when cleaning the supermarket, but is not responsible for any mess she has to clean up. She is responsible, as in accountable, for a job well or poorly done.
It is the third sense of responsibility that is key not only to shedding our psychological dependence on the state and the favour of politicians, but also to a better understanding of human freedom itself.
‘Responsibility’ is a better way of understanding liberty than ‘rights’
As a firebrand in my early years of liberal advocacy, I often came across the argument that ‘responsibility matters more than liberty’, ‘responsibility has to precede freedom’, or words to that effect.
This came primarily from those outside the liberal ecosystem, but I don’t think I ever truly understood this notion until later in my career. (Nor do I think those who made this argument necessarily conceived of responsibility in the same way I do here.)
This is not about saying ‘we have a responsibility towards our communities’ or ‘our families’ or ‘our countries’ or just towards ‘others.’
Yes, we probably do have some kind of responsibility to each of these, but what I have in mind is simpler: we need to be responsible per se. This type of responsibility is not a relative responsibility, but an absolute one. Put another way, we have a responsibility towards ourselves, and this is the only way liberty can exist and be sustained.
Liberty, after all, does not mean ‘doing whatever you want.’ It means you may do as you please provided you respect the same liberty of others, and you take responsibility for the things that you do and desire. Without this element of responsibility, ‘freedom’ ceases to be, and simply becomes ‘fun.’
Liberty follows responsibility
True liberty, then, is in effect synonymous with responsibility.
For me to say that I have freedom of expression is to say that I am responsible for the words that come out of my mouth or are written by my hands, and that I will be responsible for the consequences of that expression.
For me to say that I have a property right is to say that I am responsible for acquiring and maintaining that property, and ensuring it does not harm the vital interests of others.
I am not setting responsibility apart from rights, or downplaying rights, but saying that there can be no liberty without responsibility. With this I do not mean that ‘every right includes the responsibility to respect the rights of others’, even though this is very true. What I mean is that if you cease to be responsible for something (especially for yourself), that something can be taken away from you (including by yourself).
One example is childcare.
Parents, historically and by clear order of nature, are responsible for their children in every respect: moral guidance, education, health, safety, and so on.
However, this responsibility has progressively been outsourced to the state. Once this outsourcing is total – and we are by no means far away from that being the case – nothing, really, can stop the state from simply taking children away from their parents.
If the state has to pay for childcare, educate children, and ensure they remain healthy from birth to majority, no parents can truly appeal to their ‘parental rights’ in any real sense.
Similarly, if society hands over fixed property to the state in the form of total nationalisation, leaving people in possession of ‘personal’ property only, it would be an empty gesture for someone to claim that their ‘right to free expression’ is being violated because the state is not willing to lease them a conference venue for the gathering of their association.
The state is responsible for the property where you want to hold your conference. It pays for its maintenance and upkeep. Your pretension to a ‘right’ to use the property is hollow.
Another example is traffic.
We have outsourced the ownership and regulation of roads and vehicles to the state completely. There is no such thing as a ‘right to drive’. We drive, entirely, at the grace of government.
And even when we are granted this privilege, we have no real responsibility on the roads, because the state has taken over that responsibility with reams of ‘rules’, signs and traffic lights.
A driver in Nigeria is a responsible driver, because there is no question of responsibility there having been outsourced to a non-existent state. A driver in South Africa carries no responsibility, because ‘the rules’ are what save us. If there is a traffic accident, the question is ‘which rule was broken?’ rather than ‘why was I not paying attention?’
Could there be a better example than electricity?
For close to a century, South Africans were not responsible for their own electricity. This responsibility was outsourced, in total, to the state. If a new development went up, the municipality and Eskom had the responsibility to ensure it was electrified.
Dare we be surprised that, in 2008, Eskom felt itself entitled to implement rolling blackouts? Our complaints against loadshedding were ultimately superficial because our claim to an ‘entitlement’ to uninterrupted power supply was weak at best.
This column is not about abandoning the notion of rights – of course not!
Rights are the converse of responsibility. Where I am responsible, you’d better believe that I have a right. Employers who take the risk of generating work and being accountable for the success of the business have the right to decide what their employees will be paid. Parents who play an active role in the childcare of their offspring without relying on the state certainly have the right to make decisions regarding those children.
Rights-without-responsibility, such as the ‘right’ to internet access, the ‘right’ to a basic income, or even the common law ‘right’ to a good reputation (fama), however, are not rights.
Statism
There is something liberating about shedding responsibility, and in some sense, being human is a long process of trying to get rid of as many responsibilities as we possibly can.
We are, by nature – to a degree – rent-seekers. We prefer to have others, rather than ourselves, carry the cost of the things we value and desire.
But it exposes us to immense danger, because without responsibility we have no real claim to liberty.
When our healthcare and education become someone else’s responsibility, it should not surprise us when decisions regarding our health and education are taken by that person and not us.
Every day, those who might in the abstract have favoured England’s National Health Service or South Africa’s National Health Insurance (NHI), discover that delegating this responsibility to the state might have been a mistake.
The opponents of the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Act might now be discovering that the decision society made centuries ago to delegate responsibility for education to the state was profoundly unwise.
It is in the interest of politicians to convince us that our lot is entirely determined in the political realm. If they cannot actually make us dependent on them – which is difficult given the wonders of human agency – they at least want us to believe that we are.
When a society reaches – as so many have – the point of thinking its success or failure lies entirely in the hands of these politicians and state bureaucrats, something has gone wrong.
That is not a healthy sentiment to harbour.
It has become so bad, that around the country millions of South Africans drive past and skip over the same potholes in the roads and sidewalks every day for years without for a moment thinking they can solve that problem for themselves in short order. No, we think: we have to wait for government.
On the other hand, the liberal theory of government makes the state ‘responsible’ for exactly nothing. The state is a provider of a small handful of coercive services for which it is well-suited, but the people themselves, individually and collectively, remain responsible.
In a liberal order, the state might have a police service that protects legal subjects’ lives and property, but the individual remains the first responder to their own emergency.
The only thing in liberal society that is transferred to the government from the people is the right of self-help in disputes. This means that when two or more people are unsure about where one person’s rights end and the other person’s begin, and they cannot resolve the issue peacefully, the state (rather than the parties to the issue) must resolve the dispute coercively.
All the other so-called ‘responsibilities’ the state ostensibly carries today, like the construction of infrastructure, the negotiation of international trade, the regulation of economic activity, and the maintenance of public morality, are examples of society’s innate desire to rent-seek backfiring in its face.
In time, society will slowly begin to claw back these responsibilities when the cost of rent-seeking evidently becomes too great.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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