Using Our Options While We Still Have a Choice

There is a comforting idea that almost everyone probably knows: I’ll stay out of it.

I didn’t make this decision. It’s not my responsibility. Other people understand more about it, have more influence, more options, more time. And before I do something wrong, I’d rather do nothing at all.

That sounds reasonable. Sometimes it even is.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t play along.

It changes while we are still thinking. People make decisions, rules emerge, habits change, boundaries shift. Houses are built and torn down, forests are planted and cleared, people are welcomed and excluded. Some things happen because of what we do, others against our will, and still others because no one objected.

We can stay out of decisions. We cannot always stay out of their consequences.

That is the small design flaw in the comforting idea of remaining uninvolved: the world does not ask for our consent. Nor does it wait until we have gathered enough information, weighed every risk and received a guarantee of success. It simply carries on.

So the question is not whether the world changes. The question is what role we allow ourselves to play in that change.

The problem begins with an idea of action that is far too grand. As though one morning we had to decide that from now on, we were going to save the world. We put on a determined expression, leave the house accompanied by dramatic music and return only once justice has been established.

That would make for an exhausting Tuesday.

No one can save the world alone. And people who were absolutely certain they knew what a better world should ultimately look like have not always done humanity a favour. Responsibility therefore requires more than conviction. It also requires doubt.

Responsible action can begin with a remarkably unspectacular sentence:

I could be wrong.

We do not need an opinion on everything. We do not have to come up with an answer to every complicated question within three minutes. “I don’t know” can be an extraordinarily sensible thing to say. There is, after all, a vast territory between omniscience and cluelessness, just as there is between omnipotence and powerlessness.

That is where we live.

Which is why even the question “What difference can I make?” can easily lead us in the wrong direction. It almost demands a finished result: What did my action change? Did I solve the problem? Did I win?

As though somewhere there were a social scoreboard where the results were tallied at the end of the day.

The better question is: What can I contribute?

A member of a sports club does not have to abolish social exclusion single-handedly. A teacher does not have to defeat right-wing extremism. A youth worker does not have to resolve a social conflict. A church community does not have to rid the world of hostility towards others.

But all of them are in places where things happen.

Places where it is decided who naturally belongs. Who is listened to. Which remark goes unchallenged. Who receives support. Which rules actually matter and which exist mainly because, at some point, somebody had enough toner to print them out.

Social responsibility therefore does not begin only where the biggest conflict is taking place. It begins where we already are.

That may seem small because it is ordinary.

But we have a remarkable tendency to confuse size with visibility.

When racist slogans or swastikas suddenly appear on the walls of a school, an understandable reflex can set in: remove them as quickly as possible, attract as little attention as possible, above all protect the school’s reputation. There is only one problem: a school without a visible swastika is not automatically a school without a problem.

You can paint over colour. Meaning is more persistent.

The school administration does not have to transform overnight into a centre of expertise on right-wing extremism. Teachers, parents, student representatives and school social workers can be involved. Advice can be sought, people with experience brought in, other schools or organisations asked how they dealt with similar situations.

And what if the person you ask does not know the solution either?

They may know someone who knows someone.

It sounds almost laughably unspectacular. We even have a word for it: networking.

One person knows the problem. Another has experience with it. A third knows the right organisation to contact. Someone else can bring people together. No one has the complete solution, and strangely enough, something can still emerge.

Taking responsibility does not mean doing everything yourself. Sometimes it means making sure that something can be done.

It is easy, however, to lose sight of the fact that social action is not exclusively about standing against something. If our only response to hostility towards others is to ask how we can fight those who promote it, we inadvertently make them the centre of the story.

But there are other people this story is about.

When racist graffiti appears, the important question is not only what message we send to the person who put it there. It is also what those targeted by that message experience.

Do they experience this: We would rather not attract too much attention, so we would prefer not to talk about it?

Or this: We saw what happened. You belong here. You do not have to deal with this alone.

That is no less a form of resistance. It is something different.

It is solidarity.

A humane society, after all, does not come into being simply by defeating its enemies. It comes into being through people living it together.

A youth centre where different people are naturally welcome does not look like resistance. Nor does a club whose members look out for one another. Neither does a teacher who listens to a student, a neighbourhood where people know one another, or an institution that refuses to leave someone on their own.

And yet something crucial is happening in precisely those places. A society does not defend its values only at its boundaries. It lives them from within.

So this is not only about doing something against hostility towards others.

Above all, it is about doing something for people.

That also disposes of the idea of the lone fighter who saves democracy on everyone else’s behalf. Democracy is, after all, a remarkably unsuitable project for lone fighters.

Social action is a division of labour.

Some people demonstrate; others organise or advise. Some create public awareness; others document, mediate or provide support. Some share their experience; others create spaces where people can meet. Still others visibly stand beside those who are being told that their right to belong is somehow open to question.

None of these actions has to be sufficient on its own. That would be a fairly absurd measure of its value.

If ten people carry a heavy table together, asking which one of them carried the table is the wrong question.

None of them.

They all carried it.

And perhaps an eleventh person held the door open.

Without that person, the table still would not have made it through.

Acting together does not require everyone to be the same. It does not require everyone to stand in the same place. It requires people in different places whose contributions work together. One person can confront a conflict directly; another can organise. Someone can connect people; someone else knows which organisation might help. Some have experience, others have time, and others still have a room, a car, a printer, a useful phone number or simply the ability to listen.

Not everyone has to be able to do everything.

Not everyone has to do everything.

And no one has to win.

Yet we are remarkably good at waiting for the right moment. For someone else to begin. For enough knowledge. For circumstances to become unambiguous. For the friendly notice from the relevant authority informing us that we are now officially permitted to object.

That permission may never arrive.

Even more tempting is the demand for a guarantee of success. What difference will it make? What can my voice change? What am I supposed to achieve?

Understandable questions. But they contain a rather comfortable trap: if everyone waits to act until it is certain that enough other people will act as well and success is practically guaranteed, everyone can remain comfortably seated.

Fear of our own powerlessness is a remarkably reliable way of producing powerlessness.

My objection does not even have to persuade the person I am objecting to. Someone else may be listening. Perhaps that person thought they were the only one who found a remark intolerable. And suddenly someone speaks up.

The problem has not been solved. The world is still here; Tuesday has probably passed by now.

But something has changed: silence is no longer the only visible response.

Courage can be contagious.

Unfortunately, so can powerlessness.

None of this means that everyone must be attentive, courageous and ready to act at all times. Such a demand would not be committed. It would be merciless.

People get tired.

They are afraid.

They become overwhelmed.

They do not know what to do.

Sometimes they simply do not have the strength.

Being unable to act is not the same as being unwilling to act. Turn responsibility into a duty to fight permanently and sooner or later you mainly produce exhausted people with guilty consciences. That might be enough to found a particularly joyless movement, but not a society worth living in.

Rest is part of our capacity to act, too. We need to distinguish between taking a break and giving up.

Moving forward does not mean never stopping.

And once again, this is where other people come in. Today I may have the strength you lack. Tomorrow you may remind me why we started in the first place. The day after tomorrow neither of us may know what to do, so we ask someone with more experience.

That is not a weakness of collective action.

That is its purpose.

Because people who act can still lose. We can speak up and change nothing immediately. We can spend years working for something and still watch events move in another direction. We can fail despite the best intentions. We may even discover that we ourselves were wrong.

But if action were meaningful only when success was guaranteed in advance, almost all action would be meaningless.

We confuse hope with optimism too often.

Optimism says: It will turn out well.

Hope does not require that certainty. Hope says: I do not know whether it will turn out well. But I am not indifferent to the outcome.

There is an enormous difference.

Courage is not knowing how things will end. Courage becomes necessary precisely because we do not know.

That is also why we so easily underestimate the unspectacular possibilities available to us. As long as a society can deal with its conflicts through dissent, solidarity, organisation, education, advice, democratic institutions and collective action, those means can look almost harmless beside the grand images of history.

Their importance lies precisely in making sure those grand images never become necessary.

No one knows what decisions people may one day face. But that is no reason to think only in terms of the most extreme scenario today. Quite the opposite: there is plenty to do long before a society reaches that point.

We can object before hatred becomes normal. Support people before they are left alone. Strengthen structures before others exploit them for their own purposes. Build networks before individuals truly find themselves isolated. Use and protect democratic spaces while they remain open.

Responsibility also means preserving possibilities.

Not waiting until only bad ones remain.

For that, we do not need extraordinary people everywhere doing extraordinary things. What we need above all are ordinary people taking their possibilities seriously in ordinary places: in clubs, schools and workplaces; in communities, public institutions and trade unions; in youth centres, neighbourhoods and families.

That is where society is made every day.

Not only in parliaments, courtrooms or demonstrations.

We do not all have to do the same thing, and no one has to be able to do everything. We do not even have to know how to solve a problem ourselves. We can ask someone, bring people together, share experience, offer help and accept it.

We do not have to save the world.

We do not even have to save our own small piece of it alone.

But we should not pretend that we play no part in it simply because we are not all-powerful.

Those who do not help shape the world do not escape being shaped by it. They simply leave the shaping to others.

The world changes. It does not wait for us to make up our minds. We can neither determine what will come of our actions nor guarantee their success. And sometimes there is not even very much we can do.

But we can contribute our part.

Not someday, when someone gives us permission. Not only when success is certain. Not only where cameras are present and history is visibly being written, but also in those unspectacular places where, every day, it is decided how people live together.

Freedom does not mean being able to determine the outcome.

It begins on a much smaller scale:

by not voluntarily giving up our own role.

Because we never leave the world exactly as we found it.

The question is not whether we leave traces.

The question is what kind.

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