Blame the system

When the human factor is inconvenient

I used to be someone who could deliver a passionate rant monologue about the big bad system. I believed we’d all be better off, especially women, if it were redesigned to serve us.

My view changed after years inside systems enforced by professional managerial class (PMC) women. What I experienced was assimilation rather than liberation, despite the promise of feminism. Over time, it became harder to ignore that the system was only one part of a much messier set of conditions shaping who benefits, who advances, and who gets pushed out through scapegoating.

As a result, I’ve become increasingly sceptical of how quickly the system is blamed when people don’t get the outcomes they want.

I’m not denying that systems are important. They absolutely are. Systems shape incentives and enforceable limits on behaviour. They distribute opportunity and protect certain outcomes over others. They aren’t neutral, but they’re also not divine, omnipotent, or self-correcting. They’re manmade, built to enable coordination or flourishing under particular assumptions about how people will act.

Most systems function exactly as designed because those assumptions are rarely examined once the system is in motion. These assumptions are that people will act in good faith, share broadly similar moral norms, and regulate themselves without constant enforcement. In other words, many systems presume moral homogeneity, self-restraint, and personal responsibility, while neglecting the unconscious emotional drivers that shape action and decision-making.

When those assumptions are shown to be false because norms fragment, feedback loops weaken, and accountability diffuses, even well-intentioned systems destabilise. What looks like corruption is often a combination of bad faith and the system revealing its own assumptions. In that sense, systemic failure reflects misconduct, lack of accountability, and design premises that no longer constrain behaviour as intended.

This is part of my thinking about how quickly blaming the system becomes a stopping point rather than a starting question. In some cases, it functions less as analysis and more as a way of deflecting responsibility away from the behaviour of the people inside it. Blaming the system can offer certainty and moral clarity, but it also risks simplifying the more uncomfortable interplay between structure and behaviour into something easier to understand, but not necessarily accurate.

Responsibility is harder to pin down if the system is always to blame.

When outcomes are described as systemic, it becomes unclear who acted, who had options, who chose not to restrain themselves, or where repeated behaviour should be examined. Responsibility diffuses.

This is why I’m offering the definitions below as a form of inoculation. They reflect how I try to think: interrupting the pull toward black-and-white explanations, noticing when situations slide into the Karpman Drama Triad, and returning attention to agency and individual responsibility without pretending systems don’t matter.

They’re meant to counter language that explains repeated bad behaviour without naming the people involved. Systems, cultures, structures, and ideologies are blamed, while the individuals who act, repeatedly, are described as invisible, faultless, or powerless.

The point of these definitions isn’t to deny context or conditioning. Behaviour is shaped by different forces such as incentives, pressure, and what’s at stake in any situation. My point is to keep human agency and personal responsibility at the forefront when systems are discussed.

These definitions apply to patterns of repeated behaviour, not one-off incidents. I’m bothering to propose some clarity because we’re living in a time when moral language signals moral behaviour, substituting for behaviour constraint.

Part of what complicates these conversations is how moral language now operates in public and institutional settings. By moral language, I don’t mean ethics in a philosophical sense, or ordinary judgments about right and wrong. I mean language that frames situations primarily in terms of moral standing rather than behaviour: who’s good or bad, harmed or protected, righteous (and at times, the oppressed) or oppressive.

Moral language pulls attention away from behaviour and makes it harder to see how outcomes are actually produced.

Some systems do real damage when the same people in the same roles keep responding in the same ways despite having humane alternatives, and no one stops them.

Individual responsibility

Systems influence behaviour, but individuals enact injury. In interpersonal contexts, responsibility remains with the person who repeatedly chose, continued to choose, or failed to restrain behaviour that causes material, relational, or psychological injury to another over time or across repeated interactions.

This definition applies to:

• repeated acts against the same person

• the same injurious behaviour enacted across multiple people

• situations where there were multiple opportunities for restraint or correction

It doesn’t apply to isolated incidents, emergencies, or singular high pressure events involving forced decisions under severe time constraint.

Group responsibility

Systems influence collective behaviour, but groups generate injury through repeated, coordinated, tolerated, or unrestrained patterns of action. Responsibility therefore lies with those who initiate, enable, legitimise, or fail to constrain behaviours that cause material, relational, or psychological injury across time or across multiple people.

At the group level, responsibility is role-based, not collective guilt. It belongs to those with influence, authority, legitimacy, or a duty to restrain, not to membership alone.

When structure becomes the explanation

These definitions keep coming up for me when I look at contemporary debates about inequality, where the system is treated as the cause rather than as the context in which people act.

Structural analysis can be useful. It can show constraints, incentives, and history but it often stops there. In debates about gender inequality, pay gaps, or leadership representation, disparities are frequently taken as proof of systemic wrongdoing on their own, while the behaviours, strategies, decisions, and trade-offs that sustain those patterns are left largely untouched.

This framing becomes especially compelling when people hold authority but can’t influence outcomes. Authority without influence produces frustration and a sense of powerlessness. Structural explanations offer a way to name that frustration without having to account for how influence is actually granted, withheld, or lost.

My overall issue is that structure increasingly functions as the endpoint of explanation. Explaining outcomes this way makes responsibility unassignable. Attention shifts away from human action and systems are treated as sufficient causes in situations that would otherwise require examining who acted, who benefited, who complied, and who repeatedly chose not to intervene. I understand the appeal of certainty in situations marked by harm and conflict, but narratives that externalise responsibility tend to entrench grievance and entitlement rather than interrupt the behaviour producing the harm.

That framing can be satisfying but I’m not convinced it helps much if the goal is to understand why outcomes persist or how they might actually change.

I’m sharing this because I’m finding it harder to think clearly when everything is explained away as systemic and no one is responsible for anything anymore. If you see this differently, or have a better way of making sense of responsibility and systems, I’m genuinely interested in hearing it.

Thanks for reading,

Nathalie

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