"Mistakes Were Made" Would End a Friendship

We already know how to hear through an excuse.

In love, the rules are brutal but simple. Euphemisms don’t repair betrayal. Technicalities don’t mend a broken promise. An apology without logistics doesn’t rebuild trust.

So it was just a mistake doesn’t land. We weren’t official yet feels like evasion. You made me do it ends the conversation and leaves the conflict standing.

At home, we hold the line.

But in public life, the same evasions stroll past in suits. Oil spills hide behind “we complied with requirements.” Layoffs arrive as “the algorithm decided.”

We grill teenagers harder than Boeing. We expect more follow-through from a partner than from Exxon, a corporation whose choices shape the atmosphere.

Our willingness to stomach the hypocrisy holds the structure up.

The excuse as a service model

Excuses are a technology that companies and agencies use on purpose.

Each converts an act into abstraction, a decision into delay. The bureaucracy leaves the event intact and redistributes its consequences. When a statement says we complied, the labor of meaning-making moves to you. You fill in the missing noun, perform the patience, and clerk the fog.

That fog has a workforce: citizens performing interpretive, emotional, and administrative labor to keep the fiction of accountability intact. We translate euphemism into injury, absorb frustration as civility, and complete the paperwork that lets power remain self-congratulatory. The true cost of evasion is our time.

Artificial intelligence inherited this dodge and scales it.

The system decided is just mistakes were made, but automated and sold as inevitability.

Human thresholds, overrides, and trade-offs vanish into code. Opacity becomes a credential, and “Frictionless” comes to mean free of accountability.

When an algorithm denies benefits or dispatches police to the wrong door, the agency running it moves the responsibility onto the person it got wrong.

Someone will appeal, wait, or fill out another form. The excuse is now a service model.

Refusal is maintenance

Refusing to humor these dissonances and euphemisms is often misread as hostility. In fact it’s liberatory to reroute repair to its origin.

The tools aren’t new; they’re the same ones we use in love:

For the record, what was the act?
What action, by whom, by what date?

Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union on January 27, 1987 fails both. “I took a risk with regard to our action in Iran,” he told Congress. “It did not work, and for that I assume full responsibility.” A few sentences on: “But we did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so. We will get to the bottom of this, and I will take whatever action is called for.”1

The act is “our action in Iran.” The mistakes were made by no one. “Whatever action is called for” names no action and no date, and doesn’t say who does the calling.

A month later the noun came from someone else. The three-man review board Reagan had appointed in December, chaired by the former senator John Tower, reported that “President Reagan was in effect conducting an arms-for-American-hostages policy.” It said his chief of staff, Donald Regan, “must bear primary responsibility for the chaos that descended upon the White House when such disclosure did occur.”2 On March 4 Reagan used the board’s noun in an address to the nation: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” Even then the trading happened to the policy rather than by anyone: “what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.”3

A president’s evasion got a review board, three months of its work and a second speech. A benefits denial gets an appeal form, and the person denied supplies the noun.

Without a noun, there is no remedy. Without a steward and a timeline, there is no change.

These questions return the unpaid labor of clarity to those who produced the harm.

If your roommate burned down the kitchen and insisted it was “within compliance,” you’d throw them out. In public life, they get a subsidy.

The greater the reach—the power to shape lives, markets, air, and memory—the stricter our standard should be.

Refuse to clerk their fog.