On returning responsibility to individuals not organisations
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When Gandhi composed the principles of Satyagraha ("insistence on truth"), or civil disobedience, they included assertions of individual responsibility, including: "do not make your participation conditional on your comrades taking care of your dependants while you are engaging in the campaign or are in prison; do not expect them to provide such support".
It is this realisation—that you act as an individual, accept the consequences of your actions and act only in a way which preserves your self-respect—which differentiates civil disobedience from mob rule.
St Augustine of Hippo wrote: "Evil, unlike good, is insubstantial, so that thinking of it as an entity is misleading. Instead, evil is rather the absence or lack of good."
If good and evil share the same asymmetry as light and darkness, then evil has no independent source and can offer no resistance to any source of good, however weak or distant.
Goodness cannot be actively opposed and power becomes a consequence of benevolence. Evil, however, is the default state, while good exists only through constant effort. Any lapse or withdrawal of good appears to create evil from nothing.
This philosophy is reflected in Edmund Burke's famous observation: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
At the Nuremberg Trials, the defence that atrocities were committed because individuals were "following orders" was rejected. The trials established that every individual bears a higher moral responsibility for his or her own actions.
Similarly, in R v Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (1990), individual police officers were held personally responsible for upholding the law, even where this required disobeying unlawful orders from superiors.
As someone who believes in the fundamental goodness of humanity, I regard both situations as examples of Burke's principle. Good people often stood aside because they feared the consequences of refusing to comply.
That, in my view, is the nature of evil in the modern world. Responsibility becomes fragmented between those who issue orders, those who administer them and those who carry them out, creating uncertainty over personal accountability.
In Jersey, decisions of the States are often transformed during implementation until they bear little resemblance to the original intention. Accountability is frequently obscured, documentary evidence disappears, and responsibility becomes increasingly difficult to establish. The greatest failing is the reluctance of individuals simply to admit: "I was wrong."
Oligarchy ("rule of the few") is aristocracy ("rule of the best") corrupted. There is little more corrosive to good government than shielding individuals from the consequences of their actions behind the anonymity of a larger organisation.
Historical Archive Update
This page was updated on 27 July 2026. The content has been preserved as originally published. This update was undertaken solely to modernise the HTML markup, improve accessibility, correct obvious spelling mistakes and grammatical slips, update obsolete links where appropriate, and bring the page into line with current web standards.
While I sympathise with the principle you are getting at, I think it may be a little naive to expect more of people in general. Both scientific psychology and good old-fashioned living and learning teach that mankind is made up of a majority of conformists and a minority of individualists. Which is useful, because the latter provide the former with their leaders. But the downside is that most people's consciences are more troubled by disobeying an order than they are by committing a crime. Stanley Milgram did some famous experiments half a century ago, also drawn upon more recently by Derren Brown for some fascinating TV stunts, on how many people will go how far without the brake of external responsibility. The results were that a clear majority are not ruled by their own moral compass.
ReplyDeleteI do not expect, but I am ever hopeful that more souls will move that little bit closer to enlightenment.
ReplyDeletethe most enlightening lesson I have learnt from my non compliance to the states of jersey, is that the greater the freedom we seek the more individual responsibilty we must bear
ReplyDeleteIt is by doing our duty to others that we gain our freedoms and rights
cyril