“We live in a culture which strives to return to each of us full responsibility for his own life. The moral responsibility inherited from the Christian tradition has thus been augmented, with the help of the modern apparatus of information and communication, by the requirement that everyone should be answerable for every aspect of their lives. What this amounts to is an expulsion of the Other, who has indeed become perfectly useless in the context of a programmed management of life…
This, however, is an absurdity: no one can be expected to be entirely responsible for his own life. This Christian-cum-modern idea is futile and arrogant. It is also a utopian notion with no justification whatsoever. It requires that the individual should transform himself into a slave to his identity, his will, his responsibilities, his desire; and that he should start exercising control of all his own circuitry, as well as all the worldwide circuits that happen to cross paths within his genes, nerves or thought: a truly unheard-of servitude.”
– Jean Baudrillard
