DURING THE
LAST COUPLE OF YEARS the task of tabloids changed. The shocking stories
are
no
longer ridiculous. Today tabloids are intensifying the farce of our
daily lives by systematically reducing the seriousness of the tragic
events by placing them on their front pages.
THE RISENGA
REPORT is a story of Solveig Skinnarland, an ex-nurse, who wrote a
diary about
her suffering while she was lying in a nursing home.Solveig died without getting absolutely necessary care
that
should be provided to all patients admitted to such institutions. After
she
died the content of her diary was made public.
IN THE
«TRAM KILLING» due to negligence, a psychiatric patient was released
from the local hospital without having a place to go to. After only one
day of
being by himself, in a psychosis, he killed a person on one of the
central
trams in Oslo.
LATELY WE
HAVE LOST COUNT of how many people had died because doctors at the
emergency
care refused to treat patients because they could not get in contact
with their
local GPs.
ONE THING all these cases have in common
is that after every single event we
read in newspapers and saw on TV the “potential responsibility
taker’s” giving
endless excuses for what had happened. Their statements ranged from
that “they
could not know” to that “somebody else had responsibility
and they will find
out who it was, and make sure that it does not happen ever
again”. It was also
said at one point how “publicly it is not possible to go into
details about the
particular case because of (our good old friend) ‘confidentiality
obligation’.
In a case of Solveig’s diary (not to talk about the painful
pictures of bruises
that demonstrated amounts of pain the lady tolerated daily) the
potential
responsibility taker went as far as stating how Solveig’s story
should not be
taken so seriously since she was after all a very old and care-needy
person.
How is this
possible???
WHAT THESE
EVENTS REALLY DEMONSTRATE is just how impossible it is to pin down
responsibility for what happened to a single person. The answer to the
question
of how this is possible, Zygmunt Bauman pinpointed some years ago in
his book
“Modernity and the Holocaust”. He writes that what we are
confronted with here
is a modern phenomenon, namely the “endless free-floating of
responsibility”.
What he means is that when such situations occur and someone shall be
made
responsible, we are not able to pin down responsibility to a single
agent, and
the result is exactly the opposite: Instead of taking the
responsibility for
what had happened, on oneself, the system is actively used by single
individuals for systematic avoidance of responsibility.
Bauman’s
“free-floating of responsibility” is a phenomenon we have
difficulties avoiding
in our daily lives, due to enormous bureaucratising of our society.
Without
thinking about it in our daily life, the extreme administration of
human
relations allows us not to feel responsibility for our own actions that
effect
others.
OUR
RESPONSIBILITY for our own acts is assumed, and since we do not feel
powerful
enough to do something with this completely lacking feeling of
responsibility,
very quickly we give in to our survival strategies: We suppress the
unpleasant
in order to make life more liveable for ourselves. We end up in
something
Bauman calls “the/an agentic state” where we see ourselves
as executives of
other’s, in this case as the system’s wishes. This state is a
condition for
execution of immoral or illegitimate behaviour by persons who under
ordinary,
normal circumstances would not think of doing anything immoral. An
answer to
the question of how this is possible, that we do not even feel ashamed
once we
are confronted with catastrophic results of our action, according to
Bauman, is
very simple. We are trained by the system to feel shame or pride,
dependent of
how well or how effective we complete the task given, according to ask
by the
superior’s authoritative scale for obedience.
DUE TO THE
SYSTEM’S IDEOLOGY, we are daily convinced that our own happiness and
our own
valuable existence, in the future as well as today, lies safely in the
hands of
the system. But seen from the reflections over these particular events,
we can
only hope as individuals, each for ourselves, that we never end up on
the front
page of tabloids as either covered with bruises, as psychotic tram
killers, or
simply dead resulting from negligence at emergency care, as an
indication of
how valuable and quality determined our existence is as modern
individuals.
