Faulty Agency Assignment: "Mistakes Were Made" — By Whom?

Notice something.

A plane crashes. The headline says: "Tragedy Strikes as Aircraft Goes Down."

A bank loses millions of customers' money. The press release says: "Losses were incurred due to market volatility."

A student fails a class. The teacher says: "The material wasn't connecting."

A company dumps chemicals into a river. The statement says: "Environmental impact occurred during operations."

In every single case, something bad happened. And in every single case, the language carefully removed the human being who made it happen.

This is Faulty Agency Assignment — and it's one of the most powerful tools for avoiding accountability ever invented.

What's Actually Happening

Language has a built-in structure: subject → verb → object. Someone does something to something else.

When people want to avoid assigning blame — especially to themselves or to powerful institutions — they break this structure. They use the passive voice to erase the subject:

• "Mistakes were made." (By whom?)
• "The system failed." (The system didn't fail. People who built the system made choices.)
• "Accidents happen." (Accidents don't just happen. Conditions exist that make them likely. Someone created those conditions.)
• "The data was mishandled." (The data didn't mishandle itself.)

Sometimes this is intentional deception. Sometimes it's genuine discomfort with assigning blame. Sometimes it's cultural — in some contexts, pointing at individuals is considered rude even when it's accurate. But the effect is the same: nothing changes, because no one is responsible.

Real-Life Examples

Corporate disasters. In 2010, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico — the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Millions of gallons of oil spilled into the ocean. The corporate response was full of passive constructions: "safety procedures were not followed," "errors occurred in the cementing process." The people who cut corners on safety to save money, who ignored warning signs, who prioritised schedule over protocol — their names rarely appeared in the official language. Nothing changed until regulators dug out the actual decision-makers.

Institutional abuse. When scandals emerge in schools, churches, sports organisations — the common response involves passive language: "inappropriate relationships developed," "incidents occurred." The active reality: specific adults made specific choices to abuse specific people. Passive language makes this sound like a weather event — something that happened to the institution — rather than something people inside the institution did.

Politics. "The economy contracted." "Jobs were lost." "Inequality increased." These things don't happen by themselves. They happen because of specific policies, decisions, and priorities made by specific people with specific power. The passive framing removes all of that.

School. "The test results were disappointing." Versus: "Thirty percent of students didn't pass because they weren't taught the material correctly, and three of them are going to struggle with this gap for years." The first sentence sounds reflective. The second sentence creates pressure to change something.

Everyday conversations. "Things got weird between us." No — you said something that hurt them. Or they did. "The relationship broke down." No — specific people made specific choices, didn't communicate, avoided a conversation, said the thing that couldn't be unsaid. Passive language lets everyone feel vaguely guilty and nobody take actual responsibility.

How to Spot It

• Passive voice where an active subject should exist. "Errors occurred" — who made the error? "Damage was caused" — by what, by whom? Train yourself to mentally rewrite the sentence in active voice and notice what goes missing.

• Abstract nouns acting as agents. "The system failed." "The market decided." "History shows." Systems, markets, and history are made of human decisions. When an abstraction is doing the acting, find the humans behind it.

• The non-apology apology. "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" — the subject is the offense, not the offender. The apology is for your feelings, not for the action that caused them. Compare: "I'm sorry I said something that hurt you." The difference is tiny in words and enormous in meaning.

• Explanations that describe consequences without causes. "Forty people lost their jobs." Why? Who decided this? Under what conditions could it have been different? The passive framing stops the question before it starts.

• "No one could have known." This is a cousin of faulty agency — the preemptive claim that no one could be held responsible because the outcome was unforeseeable. Often false. Often said by people who had access to exactly the information that would have made it foreseeable.

Your Challenge

For one week, become an active-voice detective. Every time you see or hear something that sounds like "mistakes were made" or "the situation deteriorated" — rewrite it in your head with a real subject.

Start with the news. Then try it with things people say to you. Then try it with things you say — especially about your own mistakes.

The active voice isn't about punishment. It's about accuracy. When you know who made the choice, you know where to look to change things. That's it. That's the whole point.

"Things happen" is a description. "Someone did this" is a starting point.