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In “Sympathy for the Devil,” Lucifer (I’m only guessing that’s the narrator’s name, but it is an educated guess since he asks to be called that) goes through different acts of evil for which he is one hundred percent responsible (he is the Prince of Darkness, after all). Yet he also wants to hold the rest of us to account for his wrongs. I believe that Lucifer is saying we can be complicit in wrongful acts that we do not directly engage in. But, first, we need to examine this concept.

Please Allow Me to Introduce Complicity

A person is complicit with wrongdoing if she cannot be held directly responsible for a wrongful action, but is partially or indirectly related to it. I will lay out three ways she could be complicit. First, the person may not commit the immoral action but may be a necessary component for it happening or being covered up. The legal crime of aiding and abetting applies to situations where a person is complicit in this direct way. We find such a person guilty because we think she played a pivotal role without actually committing the crime. Consider the time a groupie allegedly took a driving test for Keith Richards so that Keith could have a driver’s license without learning how to drive. This groupie is so complicit in Keith’s crime of driving around illegally that the groupie could be arrested for it.

The second way a person can be complicit is by being a part of a larger group whose collective action is immoral. Suppose the majority of a state’s residents votes for a ballot proposition that bans listening to The Stones. Obviously, that’s an evil choice, but it’s made by the masses, not by any single individual acting alone. Since it’s difficult to judge one person—whose single vote has limited political significance—as responsible, we say every person who voted with the majority is complicit in the collective bad deed.

The most interesting sense of complicity combines these two. Suppose a handful of individuals are directly responsible for some evil action, but the action requires the additional activity, support, or even inactivity of the collective masses. We can consider the tragic killing of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont concert (whatever you think of Hunter, it has to be a tragedy for an eighteen-year-old, who’s too drugged out to think straight, to be killed). Surely the Hell’s Angels, who were acting as security and ended up killing Hunter have a good deal of responsibility. Even more responsibility should be on Hunter, since he had a gun and had already rushed The Stones on stage. And of course, this tragedy would never have happened if not for the wild and unruly atmosphere at Altamont. Euphoria, fueled by alcohol and drugs, fanned into delirium by fantastic rock’n’roll, aided by a sense of paranoia since Mick had already been attacked, mixed with the toughness of gangster security—all this made for a feral mix. But, once blame is dispersed through the three hundred thousand members of the crowd, we can’t claim individuals are “responsible.” Maybe though a person can be held complicit for playing a small part in creating this toxic atmosphere that led to a young man’s death.

This way of being complicit brings us back to our collective complicity in the drug trade. Regardless of what you think about the morality of taking drugs, the larger drug wars include some horrendous activities, such as drug dealing children and the assassinations of prosecutors and judges. In our society, we fall into three groups: those who actively participate in the drug trade at the criminal level (the kingpins, dealers, and assassins), those who merely support the drug trade through their purchases (the users), and those who support it indirectly by spending money in ways that help others buy drugs (everyone else). This last kind of support, obviously, is spread out over a lot of people, but without everyone playing his or her part, there could be no drug trade. Without the drug trade, there would be no drug wars.