We can't be responsible for other people's actions

We can't be responsible for other people's actions is a recurring expression of institutional self-exoneration. Its force lies in drawing a narrow boundary around responsibility: officials claim ownership only of what they themselves do, while treating the consequences for an exposed informant as decisions made by others. The novel repeatedly places that reasoning beside the risks and concealments it helps make possible, turning a disclaimer into a pattern of conduct rather than a neutral statement of principle.

Meaning and rhetorical function

The reasoning is presented as a chain. Police representatives have spoken with a lawyer who represents two Wojtek members serving time in Aspsås prison; the lawyer may pass information to his clients, who may then act on it. Each step is framed as another person’s choice. The officials’ own part is described as limited to speaking with the lawyer, while the possibility that the information could endanger Piet Hoffmann is displaced onto the lawyer, the prisoners, or the organization.

That division of responsibility is more than a prediction that other people may behave unpredictably. It permits the speakers to treat a foreseeable result as though it belonged entirely to someone else. The expression makes responsibility sound as if it ends at the edge of an individual act. In practice, however, the passage shows that information travels through relationships and institutions: a conversation can become a disclosure, and a disclosure can expose the person whose covert work made the information available.

The reasoning reaches its bluntest practical consequence when the participants conclude that Hoffmann will be burned. Elsewhere, the same words recur amid coffee and the movement of papers across a table, as the participants dwell on the claim that the organization’s response is not their problem. The repetition gives the expression the quality of a rehearsed defense. It does not change the danger being discussed; it lets the speakers continue while disowning their part in what may follow.

Instructions, concealment, and resistance

The novel links this logic to actions inside Aspsås prison. The prison chief warden, Lennart Oscarsson, is told by the general director that Ewert Grens, a detective superintendent from the City Police, must not be allowed to question Hoffmann in G2, either that day or the next. Oscarsson initially does not understand why the instruction angers him. Only later, while washing a single plate, glass, and set of cutlery after supper, does he recognize the instruction as a lie. The abrupt domestic detail places an official intervention within the ordinary routine of a man who now lives alone, while marking the moment when his irritation becomes a judgment about what he has been told.

The pressure becomes personal when Oscarsson’s colleague and friend Martin Jacobson asks him to look at him and demands an explanation. Oscarsson tells him not to ask questions, then invokes the chain of command and orders him to act. Jacobson refuses to carry out the order to move Hoffmann back, insisting that Oscarsson will have to do it himself. The exchange supplies a counterpoint to the expression: where the disclaimer disperses responsibility, Jacobson’s refusal makes the person issuing the order answer for it. His response does not undo the pressure placed on Hoffmann, but it prevents that pressure from becoming an unquestioned routine at this point.

During the prison crisis, the fiction of separation between instruction and consequence becomes still harder to sustain. Grens calls the situation a lie and tells Mariana Hermansson to continue investigating and get an answer from the prison chief warden. The setting is no longer a discussion over coffee or a private command at home; the obstruction is part of an unfolding emergency. The expression’s logic has not prevented consequences from reaching the prison. It has instead made it harder to establish who is responsible for the decisions behind them.

From individual cases to an institutional pattern

Grens’s later examination of intelligence records gives the expression a wider context. He finds 302 secret intelligence reports covering the preceding year, including accounts in which an informant’s work to uncover one crime had given rise to another. Some reports concern investigations he recognizes—cases that had collapsed even though the relevant knowledge was already held within the institution. The contrast is between the incomplete information available to investigators and the fuller account preserved in secret reports. Their investigation had been downgraded on the basis of what they were allowed to know.

When Grens confronts prosecutor Lars Ågestam, he identifies twenty-three cases in which Ågestam had prosecuted unsuccessfully and closed the cases without the information contained in the secret reports. The problem, as Grens describes it, is not a single omitted fact. An official investigation and a separate, secret intelligence record have carried different versions of events. Concealment has affected case outcomes, while preventing those working on ordinary investigations from seeing the information that could have changed their understanding.

The novel’s concluding account states that the Swedish Police Service has used criminals as covert human intelligence sources while denying and concealing that cooperation. It says that other crimes have been marginalized and that preliminary investigations and trials have proceeded without correct information. It also describes criminal intelligence records and reports being used to construct credible personal backgrounds for informants, with extensive alteration of information treated as standard practice. When an informant is exposed, the authorities deny having used the person and leave the infiltrated organization to resolve the problem. These statements make the expression part of a system of disavowal: the consequences are not merely attributed to individual choices but obscured by the institution’s handling of information and its refusal to acknowledge the relationship.

Significance

The expression’s repeated appearance creates a gap between its claim and the evidence surrounding it. Its speakers define responsibility narrowly, but the narrative shows that decisions about what to disclose, what to hide, and whom to prevent from asking questions shape the risks that follow. The phrase is therefore less an answer to the question of responsibility than a method of moving it elsewhere.

Its recurrence also links separate scales of the story. In one scene, officials rationalize exposing Hoffmann through an intermediary; in another, Oscarsson receives an order whose basis he recognizes as a lie; later, Grens discovers hundreds of secret reports and cases whose public record lacked crucial information. The same structure appears in each: knowledge is controlled, responsibility is divided, and the person outside the protected circle bears consequences. Against that structure, Jacobson’s refusal to obey and Grens’s insistence on investigating the lie matter because they reject the premise that an order, a disclosure, or an institutional boundary can make the consequences belong to nobody.