Responsibility. The missing word in politics

When politics shifts to answering what this moment asks of us, responsibility becomes its deepest source of meaning.

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Yesterday, a friend showed me an old book that meant a lot to him.

Man’s Search for Meaning was written in 1946, in the shadow of the concentration camps, by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. It is not a political book. And yet, reading it now, it feels uncannily relevant to the moment we are living in – politically, culturally, and morally.

Frankl turns the question of meaning upside down. Instead of asking what do I want from life? he insists we ask: what is life asking of me?

Meaning, he argues, does not come from success, happiness, recognition, or achievement pursued directly. Those things may come – or they may not – but they are always secondary. Meaning emerges as a side-effect of something else: responsibility.

Responsibility to a task.
Responsibility to a person.
Responsibility to a situation that cannot be ignored.

Responsibility? How absent this value has become in contemporary politics. We hear endless talk of leadership, growth, opportunity, aspiration, innovation. But responsibility – real and honest responsibility, understood as answering to the moment we are in – is not on the agenda.

Yet, this is precisely what our time demands.

Climate breakdown is not an abstract policy issue. Democratic erosion is not a theoretical concern. Social fragmentation is not some future risk. These are problems already we are confronted with – daily, hourly.

This is why Frankl resonates with community-based politics, and especially with the Voices of movement, the Community Independents movement.

Voices of politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. It is not driven by ideology or ambition of personal advancement. It begins somewhere quieter and much more ambitous. It begins when people in a community recognise that something is wrong, and that waiting for someone else to fix it is like watching the house fill with smoke while assuming the fire brigade will arrive in time.

That recognition is responsibility.

Frankl makes a simple but confronting claim: life does not owe us fulfilment. Life confronts us with tasks, and meaning arises from how we respond to them.

In a similar line, politics is not about success. It is about response.

When movements obsess over outcomes – polls, seats, victories – they often lose their footing. When they focus instead on doing what conscience demands, something else happens. Trust builds. Energy accumulates. People step forward.

Success, if it comes, comes later. And when it arrives, it will be because the work itself was worth doing.

Frankl’s insists that the dividing line in humanity is not between groups, classes, or ideologies, but between decency and indecency – and that this line runs through every society, every institution, every person.

That insight matters in a political culture addicted to tribalism.

Community Independent politics asks whether decency is still possible under pressure – and whether people are willing to choose it.

Responsibility, in this sense, is about agency.

It is about recognising that we are being addressed by reality, and that refusing to answer is itself an answer.

Frankl argues that human beings do not flourish in comfort or equilibrium, but in tension – the tension between what is and what ought to be. Remove that tension, and people drift into emptiness, boredom, resentment, or aggression.

But when you face it honestly, something else becomes possible.

That insight from 1945 feels accurate today.

Perhaps the quiet strength of Voices of politics lies precisely here.

Not in promising easy solutions, but in refusing avoidance.

Not in chasing success, but in answering the question of the moment as best we can.

What is being asked of us – here, now – in this place, with these people, under these conditions?

That question cannot be outsourced. It cannot be deferred. And it cannot be answered with the protection of ‘business as usual’.

It can only be answered by taking responsibility – and acting accordingly.

If success follows, it will do so because we stopped aiming at it, and focused instead on what needed to be done.

As Winston Churchill is famously quoted, “It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”

And that is the deeper shift our politics is waiting for.

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