Complacency and Complicity

Twenty years ago if a journalist or a TV presenter used inflammatory language, either on TV, or in a magazine or a publication or any public event where there were enough people to witness what they said then chances are they would have been fired.  Codes of conduct and expectation of behaviour in the public eye were de rigueur.  That seems to have changed somewhat.

I can't help but feel that we have swapped one form of unacceptable behaviour that was overlooked for another.  Whilst all of the above was met with derision and often dismissal, behind the scenes what people got away with that wasn't in the public eye is a million times worse.  Sexual Abuse, Exploitation, Harassment, Institutional Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, the list goes on.  In many cases these behaviours were known about and yet the employers did nothing out of complacency, many more were complicit.  Decades later as revelations abound and everything is coming to light, those who behaved in this way are being brought to account for their actions.  In some cases this has led to criminal trials and convictions.  The employers of the day have often touted the same line that they had no idea what was happening even with evidence that was not the case, the fact it all happened behind closed doors makes it hard to prove.

Whilst this unacceptable behaviour was it appears tolerated by the employers but not publicly acknowledged, there is a fundamental shift that has now happened thanks to social media, predominantly sites like Twitter specifically which promote the mantra of public by default with regards to the visibility of what you share.  The separation of professional and personal lives has become blurred to the point where we can now see through the facade and see the face behind it.  Time and again now, the people who would have been fired twenty years ago for what they said, openly express the same views on these platforms and their employers do nothing.

This raises the question of accountability.  In years to come if the same revelations abound about the behaviours of those individuals out of the public eye then the employers will have no line of defense at all when it comes to claiming ignorance.  We have all seen what those people really think, we have seen how they behave, to claim ignorance on the part of the employer would be to profess incompetence as an employer, which will lead to much greater scrutiny especially those that are funded by public money.  The shift in accountability might then move to the employers themselves and the legal consequences would then be levied against them.

There is a perplexing flip that then occurs as a result of this change, namely that whilst before, you were held accountable for your actions if you were caught and that could have implications for your career, you are now in a position where your employer is held accountable for your actions if you are caught and that has little implication for you in terms of legal ramifications.  The shift in accountability is moving the responsibility for your actions away from yourself which in turn is encouraging ever more extreme behaviour in the knowledge that you won't suffer for it, someone else will.  Those employers however as stated above are complacent and in many cases complicit, to the extent where they do almost nothing at all now.  We are living in a time where you can openly break the law and do whatever you want as long as you are acting with agency of another, a business or organization - in the past we called that being an accessory to the fact, today however, this doesn't seem to apply anymore.