The Politics of “Why”

The question of “why” is always a political question. Imagine you leave your bike outside your front door of your suburban house, and by the time you wake up, your bike has been stolen. Why did this happen? Wasn’t it your fault for not securing your bike? But wasn’t it the thief’s fault for actually committing the crime, and if so doesn’t that mean that it’s not your fault. And after all, isn’t it really the government’s fault for fostering all this crime to exist in the first place?

All 3 are valid answers, but not at the same time. The fact that the government wasn’t able to establish a safe environment doesn’t absolve the criminal of his actions, nor does the illegal behavior of the criminal absolve the biker of his personal responsibility. Whenever people ask the question “why,” the context is most of the question, even if we seem to always talk around it. If we don’t acknowledge the different contexts and put the blame 100% on the actual thief, as in the legal context, then we avoid opportunities for growth.

Just because all 3 answers are valid, doesn’t mean that they’re equal. There’s always an implied context, and I find myself going back to the serenity prayer as a guide.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Most of the time that people ask “why” something happened, they’re really asking which of the things in their control can change the outcome in the future. If you live in the city, you know it’s foolish behavior to leave a bike unlocked/unattended.

Although this is “victim blaming,” this framework allows for constructive personal responsibility without the two negative parts of it. First, some people believe personal misfortunes which are a result of one’s own actions are undeserving of sympathy. These people are simply bad listeners and bad friends. Secondly, victim blaming is often used with the intention of minimizing blame at other actors. We should explicitly recognize the different contexts as we discuss blame, to keep attribution clear.

Blameless culture has been one of the key ideologies of the tech world. In blameless culture, when there are mistakes: server outages, cybersecurity incidents, etc… Everyone involved joins together to write a post-mortem, and acknowledges all the different levels of issues that co-occurred. Instead of modeling an incident as the result of a particular engineer’s code change, infrastructure teams will question why the automatic tests didn’t catch the error, or why the fallback systems took too long to come back online. Imagine being in the meeting room with executives discussing how they can prevent this from happening again. They know they can’t change the behavior of every engineer to be perfect. Instead they have to focus on creating resilient systems.

We can even turn the Serenity Prayer inwards. The prayer is widely known for its use in Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA founder took the approach that many alcoholics have a problem of “self-will run riot.” Sometimes it helps to model our own behavior as having controllable and uncontrollable parts. Then we can control our environment, for example by not keeping junk food or alcohol around us.