Taking Responsibility

I find it exceedingly funny to see "leaders" going through the kabuki dance of "taking responsibility" when they fail. When a corner store robber flubs it, he is arrested and thrown in jail. When a Wall Street banker flubs it and looses hundreds of billions of other people's money, he is carefully shepherded by his minions to a public venue and encouraged to say the golden words "I take responsibility for this" then they are carefully stage managed off the stage and that's it. Yes, that's it! The "take responsibility" thing is nothing more than an empty ritual. Apparantly when you are at the top, the mere words "I take responsibility" is sufficient to heal the wounds and restore the losses. But... they don't.

Here are key bits from a nice article from Slate by Daniel Gross about this phenomenon:

For centuries, historians have debated whether history is propelled by Great Men (and Women), human forces of nature who bend events and systems to their will, or by vast impersonal forces (communism, capitalism, globalization) that render even the most powerful of us a mere reed basket floating in a massive river. There's no session on the subject at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.

Ordinarily, Davos is a Great Men kind of place, as the motto of this year's gathering implies: "Shaping the post-crisis world." The people who show up here—political leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, musicians, and, above all, businesspeople—have all shown an ability to impose themselves on history. Otherwise, they wouldn't be invited. And yet in the many discussions held here about the recent global financial debacle, the question of human agency is shunted to the side.

...

The dismissal of human agency is ironic, but also predictable. Just as financial markets in the United States privatize profits and socialize losses, Davos and other conferences like this privatize success (by chalking it up to individuals) and socialize failure (by blaming it on large systemic problems).