104. Systemically Flawed

When something goes wrong, we look around for someone to blame. There must be some person (or group of people) who is responsible. We want to hold that person accountable, just as we are held accountable for our actions. This basic reciprocity is the foundation of our social relationships, and helps to ensure they remain predictable and reliable.

When there is wrongdoing outside of our personal sphere, we tend to demand the same kind of accountability from the people involved. We believe that whoever was in charge must be held responsible. We are not wrong about this, but the situation is also more complex than it seems.

Most large-scale wrongdoing inside organizations and institutions is not the sole result of bad judgments by particular individuals. It is rather the direct consequence of the interconnected and complex systems we have collectively constructed. Individuals acting prudently out of self-interest will necessarily cause harm because these systems are themselves deeply flawed.

Responsibility for systemic flaws is nearly impossible to assess. These systems are often the product of many different decisions by many different people that have accumulated over a very long time. And because there is no way to get accountability from a lifeless system or the countless people responsible for its current form, we instead seek it from those few individuals who happen to be in charge.

This is not to say that we are wrong to want justice, or that the people in charge are somehow relieved from responsibility for their actions. But rather, people with enormous power will also eventually take the path that leads to enormous personal benefit, regardless of the harmful externalities that are produced by doing so.

To begin to truly eliminate the harm that so deeply offends us, we have to look beyond individual bad actors and towards the very systems we rely on and often uncritically pass off as good.