A Few Words on Social Responsibility

Responsibility is the most important value of being alive.

What makes an action a matter of responsibility, above all else, is its human side: love for people, sincerity, a passion for knowledge, the will to build and repair, and the carrying out of our duties towards humanity through efforts that seek nothing in return.

Social responsibility is people and societies treating one another with care. Because we were born into a time when problems have piled one on top of another, we sometimes find ourselves complaining about our lot.

Yet a person should not want to run from the problems they live among, but to face them and to solve them. Social responsibility work means producing answers to environmental, social, cultural and economic problems, and acting to meet real needs.

Today we see that institutions which have made social responsibility part of their culture often work to benefit the people their own existence depends on, rather than to answer the problems of society. Businesses ought instead to be creating shared value together with the society around them. Individuals should work not only for themselves but for the community they belong to, and make it richer.

With a sense of social responsibility, by noticing what society needs and trying to become part of the answer, we can make this world of ours more beautiful.

Being alert to problems and taking an active part in them is what makes a solution easy to reach.

Sadly, our world has no shortage of problems waiting to be solved. Pollution that has grown into a threat to our health, epidemics, natural disasters, thirst, hunger, poverty, lack of schooling: hundreds of problems are waiting. In many parts of the world there are people who cannot exercise their right to an education or their right to information. Running from problems is no solution, and it will do no good at all.

With a sense of social responsibility we can clear these problems away. The ways forward are found when individuals, institutions and societies work together. Separating rubbish into plastic, glass and paper and making sure it is recycled is one of the simplest examples of a solution, and it helps prevent pollution. For people who cannot meet even their most basic needs we can take part in relief work, join the work of aid organisations, and give our support as volunteers.

For a world worth living in we have to work side by side on the answers. Talking about problems, or glancing at them from a distance and walking on, will not serve any solution. We have to take a step, come up with projects that change things, support the projects already under way, and make the effort to be part of the answer.

In the Bantu languages of Africa the word “Ubuntu” carries the thought “I am because we are”, and with it values such as love, compassion, respect, sharing and togetherness. That thought is the “ideal of keeping one another alive”. We too, as individuals and as institutions, should carry out our social responsibilities with that ideal in mind.

Everything done for the sake of humanity brings peace and good to society, and it brings the individual an inner peace of their own.