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Responsibility
2 min read · 480 words
Responsibility is the operator’s claim of authorship over what their system produces.
Every output the operator produces — words, behavior, work, impact on others — came through the operator’s machinery, with some combination of conscious choice, default pattern, and conditioning. The output may have been produced under difficult conditions. It may have been produced by patterns the operator did not consciously install. But it was produced through this operator, by this machinery, in this situation. Responsibility is the acknowledgment of that authorship.
The mechanism most operators use to avoid responsibility: external attribution. I did it because of them. I did it because of the conditions. I did it because of how I was raised. I did it because the situation forced me. Each of these may contain some truth — outputs are partly shaped by conditions. But the output was still produced through the operator. Different operators in similar conditions produce different outputs, which means conditions don’t fully determine what the operator produces. The operator’s machinery, with its current configuration, is part of the cause. Avoiding this acknowledgment denies the only variable the operator can change.
The other distortion: taking responsibility for what isn’t actually the operator’s authorship. The operator who claims responsibility for outcomes determined by others, for the weather, for events that occurred outside their machinery’s involvement, is overclaiming. The overclaiming usually serves a different function than accurate responsibility — often the maintenance of an inflated sense of control, or the absorbing of blame in a relationship where someone else’s actual responsibility goes unaddressed. This is its own dysfunction, distinct from the underclaiming version.
From the chair: the accurate claim is responsibility for what the operator’s machinery produced. The choice that was made through the operator’s decision systems. The behavior that came out of the operator’s body. The patterns that ran through the operator’s wiring. The impact those produced on the world and on others. These are the territory of responsibility.
What is not the territory: the conditions the operator did not produce. Other operators’ choices. Outcomes determined by factors outside the operator’s machinery. The operator was not responsible for being given the body, the conditioning, the early environment, the situation they currently find themselves in. They are responsible for what they do with the equipment they have, in the conditions they’re operating in.
The cleanest version of responsibility: this output came through me; I am responsible for it; I will address what it produced; I will work on what produced it. Without minimization. Without external attribution. Without the addition of self-attack that goes beyond the legitimate claim of authorship. The acknowledgment by itself is the operation. The work that follows from it is the next operation, and it is more available because the responsibility has been claimed cleanly.