Power Against Consequences

The systemic destruction of responsibility

Aleksandr Babarikin’s impressions of New York

Our current social, economic, and surely cultural predicaments can easily be thought of as post-political. The twentieth century was full of horrors, missed opportunities, and even though the end of history turned out to be yet another empty bullet shot by the (neo-)liberal apologists, the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ proves to be just as charged — if not more so — as the nuclear promises of the post-war period. If the old century did not end well, as Eric Hobsbawm famously claimed, the new one followed and expanded on these tragedies, especially concerning — even the possibility of — alternatives to the dominant economic and political discourse. That is to say, the last century did not end well; this one did not start well either. And nothing is surprising about this, insofar as history — and with it everything that accompanies our daily lives, our intimate moments within history — is based on continuity, on a plurality of causal relationships, and ultimately has a myriad of consequences itself.

Moreover, in the historical moment that we find ourselves at: the horrifying onslaught of environmental changes, the proliferation of political violence across the globe, the struggle for a new international establishment, the political success of right-wing leaders and parties, our general feeling is one of loss, at least for those of us with left-wing sympathies. Everything listed, however, marks a general shift, one we have not seen in such a large-scale display for quite some time now. Until recently, it seemed that the main players who were acquitted by default, eternally redeemed, and eternally maintained were the big economic players.

Still, this shift marks the self-placement of capitalist states in a zone of anomie, where every action, every whim of the major global powers — whether by individual villains or groups — can be carried out without any discernible consequences, neither local nor international. We indeed live in a historically significant moment, as journalists parrot all around, referring to the remilitarization of Europe, Trump 2.0, the terrifyingly explicit evilness of the genocide in Gaza, and so on. Yet, if the Zeitgeist is shifting in front of our eyes, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been doing so for a long time now.

What we are witnessing is a moment in which Europe and the whole world finally reveal the decades-old corpses of its post-war projects and the absurdity of its infantile ambitions and assurances. Neither international law nor the institutions established and maintained at the expense of millions of starving people are capable of countering the indifference of the economic and/or political elite, or, for that matter, of those institutions themselves. It is naive to expect the villain in the fairy tale to prevail over himself. Or that there could be consequences for those who are initially tasked with determining the consequences for everyone else.

It is precisely the consequences that interest me here: the very concept of consequence and everything it implies within the sphere of our shared world. But let me at once parry any existential, personal, and other interpretations, if the title is not sufficient for that. I’m not interested in the strictly existential here. Not my choice, not yours or his, hers or theirs, no matter how much the painfully repetitive discursive vindication of the system — at the expense of the individual victims of it — insists, but how we are consistently taught not to seek responsibility at all, except, perhaps, within the ‘consumer responsibility’ narrative. Consequences no longer follow actions. This is not an accident but the operating logic of our age: a regime of anti-consequentialism, where power is measured by the ability to evade accountability.

I’m interested, in other words, in how these individual or personal dimensions, although extremely important, are copied from the performance of the political and the corporate, of the whole spectacle of power, in which it is solely the consequences, solely the burden of responsibility for what our actions may lead to, that are fundamentally rejected and, in the final analysis, shamelessly neglected. The mystifying gestures of the powers that be are as endless as their promises. Even when we sin as ‘bad-faith’ consumers or rely on unsustainable practices in our own small sphere of experience, we think and compare ourselves to the great sinners — with their unquenchable thirst for anything that can bring them profit — and casually conclude that we are just ‘a drop in the sea.’

And we are, indeed. A drop in the sea of gratuitousness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ignoring the fact that most of us, especially the most destitute, choose the cheapest option; on the contrary. I’m protesting against our inability to afford anything else. I’m dissenting against the fact that such products exist at all, that the entire market is itself a product of the over-exploitation of humans, non-humans, and resources to such an extent that, in the end, it is irrelevant what you choose. That even our psyches are products of those horrors.

However, it seems to me that there is some form of reversal here, a kind of destructive self-expansion that tries to extrapolate our current fears of being held responsible into a sphere where there is no responsibility, no consequences at all. This is, in other words, an attempt to project the desire to be just as great, to have just as much scope for action and sidestepping as the great sinners. A sympathy is established here, next to jealousy. A hallucinatory place is formed, one in which, albeit constituted through a narrative about oneself as “I would do things differently,” secretly rests on “then it won’t really matter.”

If capital is freedom, it is thought of as freedom and manifests as freedom — as the dogma of our contemporary narrative teaches us — that means capital is the only true possession that can relieve us of responsibility. We need to attain it in order to stop feeling responsible and/or held accountable. And where there are no responsibilities, there is no reason to ask and look for consequences. Thus, if consequentialism, as an ethical school of thought, evaluates actions by their ends, by what they lead to, our epoch perverts this by rendering ends irrelevant — not to embrace duty or virtue, but to license irresponsibility. Yet this isn’t just its opposite, a non-consequentialism, as yet another ethical philosophy, but an utterly violent and systemic take on anti-consequentialism. It is the very logic our world moves with, through, and around.

Paradoxically, the consumer’s fatalism, experienced thanks to the meaninglessness of our choices, mirrors the ethos of capital, according to which profits justify it all — not as coincidence, but as the internalized logic of the system itself. Here, subjectivity embraces and elaborates further a system that rewards one’s lack of empathy for the world and everything in it. And when there are consequences — since there always are — this same ethos, with its striving for infinite growth, collapses history into an eternal present where consequences are neither prevented nor answered — only monetized. It is here, in other words, where historical continuity breaks down, and thus the wrongdoers themselves become mystified. It is this latter state that is particularly appealing. To be mystified, to be “hidden” from the judging eyes of others, yet also of oneself, well-immersed in a blissful absence of any control over, of any responsibility whatsoever. If one isn’t controlled, one controls.

To give an example, for the farmers around me, it doesn’t matter how much poison they spray in their yards, how much they spray on the land they cultivate in the village’s fields, as long as the large landowners spray hundreds of times more to increase their yields in the whole region. It doesn’t matter how many trees they will cut down, given that large timber producers will cut thousands of times more. They see themselves as just a drop in the sea. And they are. Yet, the sea is made of drops, as the cliched answer to the cliched expression insists. And the illusion of no consequences, even if well-established institutionally, doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences at all. Another year of drought, extreme heat — both highly unusual for our region — and uncontrollable pests, amidst the land, already devastated by overwork, proves the opposite.

With all that is happening around us, so spontaneously cruel, so childishly capricious, we can easily label our times as non-consequentialist. From the genocide in Gaza to all the toxins in our soil and air, to the violence we commit to each other, live and online, etc., the same logic prevails: consequences are deferred until they become catastrophes — and even then, accountability dissolves into the ‘sea’ of systemic absolution.

By considering our times as fundamentally ‘non-consequentialist,’ I do not try to push forward a somehow superior moral stance, quite the opposite. No morality can undo ecological and societal collapse. What I tried to do here, instead, was to start a conversation about the weaponization of non-consequentialism by the system, its turn into a specific regime of control. Taking into consideration the ‘slow cancellation of the future,’ the unsurpassable presentism that more or less has gripped us all, such a conceptualization seems even more applicable, since, let’s face it: if tomorrow doesn’t exist, neither do consequences.

If we are to fight it — that is, to turn political once again — we must drag consequences back into the light of history.

By any means, if necessary.

We must become consequences ourselves.