On A Loose End

A friend of mine once told me about the futility of Collective Bullshit. He was talking in terms of a boss bullshitting his subordinates collectively. He said, “It is simple, whenever the boss is bullshitting collectively, one needs to just look at some other person in the group and the entire bullshit gets deflected to that person.” In other words, everyone looks at some other person as if that person is the culprit and that way every one can keep his/her own conscience clean. The same holds true for collective responsibility also. Let’s take, for instance, the Mumbai terror attacks. When the question of responsibility came up everyone right from the Home minister of India, the chief minister of Maharashtra, the deputy Chief Minister and Director General of Police and the Mumbai Police commissioner refused to acknowledge their responsibility. The Home Minister of India had to be forced to resign by the congress part and did so very reluctantly, as did the Chief Minister and his deputy...