Our revels now are ended.

It was about that time that I realised there was little point complaining anymore. I had seen enough. Institutions entrusted with knowledge, universities supposedly devoted to understanding, governments nominally accountable to the people they govern. Opportunities squandered. Intelligence subordinated to authority. Incompetence rewarded, failure reproduced, consequences passed along to those least able to bear them. I had spent years examining what was going wrong, who was responsible, why our institutions could not correct themselves, and why talking about their failures accomplished so little. I had hoped to make some difference. To contribute something that mattered. But apparently the preservation of institutional authority is a more pressing concern than the occasional inconvenience of understanding anything. Cruelty, greed, selfishness, hatred and fear continued their familiar work, while the accumulating consequences of climate change exposed the distance between what humanity knows and what it is prepared to do. Executive incompetence was not merely tolerated. It was reproduced, occasionally promoted, and frequently celebrated. Like information technology outsourcing its failures onto customers, institutions displaced the costs of their dysfunction onto those with the least power to resist. And the world went on. Repeating its mistakes. Preserving its authorities. Consuming its possibilities. No doubt another committee would look into it.

There is, however, an unexpected freedom in recognising this. For years I had carried a burden that was never mine to carry. I had mistaken understanding for obligation, concern for responsibility, and the possibility of making a difference for a duty to repair what others had broken. Yet responsibility does not exist independently of agency. It arises through relationships of capacity, action and consequence. Without the capacity to influence an outcome, responsibility for that outcome cannot meaningfully reside. To accept responsibility for the failures of civilisation is to accept the final displacement of responsibility from those who exercise power to those who do not. A rather convenient arrangement for everyone except those expected to clean up the mess. I have seen what I have seen. I have understood what I could. I have offered what I had to offer. Some things may persist, others disappear, and much of what matters will pass without recognition. There is sadness in that, but no longer an obligation. Optimism need not promise a better world, nor must care become an endless burden. I remain responsible for what I do, not for everything that happens. The world will go on, with its beauty and its cruelty, its possibilities and its failures. The institutions will continue congratulating themselves. The committees will continue meeting. And I have finally understood something rather liberating. I cannot carry the world. I was never obliged to. I let it go.