The Vivid Dangers of Our Indifference to a Hellish World

by mobanmarketin NEWSon Posted on

A healthy culture isn’t one that basks in ignorance and selfishness, that glorifies those who avoid taking a stand (calling such cowardliness “neutrality”), and fosters the gaping black-hole of absence of life as though lack of feeling were a metric of high social standards.

People are making the choice to ignore hell, and that is a choice to do nothing. The business-as-usual mentality of society as a whole is one where we believe that accommodating ourselves to rife injustice is a way to look after ourselves. But in-fact, adjusting to abuse (against yourself or others) is unhealthy for both society and individuals. A healthy culture isn’t one that basks in ignorance and selfishness, that glorifies those who avoid taking a stand (calling such cowardliness “neutrality”), and fosters the gaping black-hole of absence of life as though lack of feeling were a metric of high social standards. Rather, a healthy culture names, remembers, and calls out injustice, and celebrates informed participation in social decision making.

Contributing factors to a collective ignoring of hell

In my city of Puebla, Mexico last year, there was a major earthquake that saw hundreds killed and thousands left homeless. For months, people here collected food and building material donations and traveled to remote areas, helping to rebuild. Financial donations came in from around the world. Why isn’t there the same sense of urgency and commitment to combating poverty?

1) Those who have power are taking the lead in doing nothing

It’s easy to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to a sports stadium and wherever personal gain is involved, but we struggle to unite to make the necessary changes to the world so that it can provide the basics to everyone. World “leaders” have met repeatedly to discuss climate goals, but failed to do anything. A big part of that is that the people who have economic and political power are governing for themselves and their fellow elites, rather than for humanity, and refuse to take any sort of a lead in anything.

2) The world is someone else’s responsibility

And while the leaders are inactive, so are the rest of us. The daunting abyss between what is wrong with the world and what we think we are able to do about it, is a result of the economic and political elites not allowing even measly scraps of power to trickle down to the rest. Encumbered with resignation, defeat, and impotency, we put up with things when we believe that something better isn’t possible and that we are powerless.

At the same time, the prevailing mentality is that the world is there to be used (take its energy, wood, minerals and metals) but that we don’t owe it or anyone anything. The culture of “it’s not my business” and “each to his/her own” negates the idea that the world is in fact our business and we should have a reciprocal relationship with both the planet and with the people who help provide us with a home and a life. Instead, there’s a sense of entitlement, especially in “first world” (ie wealthy) countries.

Inequality, poverty, abuse of the planet’s resources and more have become “natural” phenomenon. Unlike an earthquake which surprises unlucky victims and is framed as a tragedy by the media, the poverty of billions of people is not a tragedy – instead, it is seen as something that is basically deserved and normal. Ironically, it is earthquakes that are natural and there is little we can do about them, whereas inequality is not natural. It is a conscious policy.

4) Racism and classism mean we don’t care about most people

5) The bystander effect: indifference is self-perpetuating

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6) The numbers can be overwhelming

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7) There’s a lack of critical thought and knowledge

A healthy society isn’t one that tolerates people expressing an opinion, it’s one that encourages and thrives on that by teaching critical thought and consistently giving children through to adults all the tools and information necessary to be able to navigate current events and participate in a full way in society. Instead, most of us leave high school having memorized the periodic table, but with no clue about the origins of injustices nor what we can do about them. This intentional political illiteracy is marginalizing and undemocratic, relegating most of us to watching, unamused, as the world falls apart, and unable to wrap our heads around it all.

8) We’re taught to be fatalistic

Encouraged by ignorance, religion (usually), and political leaders who don’t lead or act, a prevailing cultural belief that whatever happens is inevitable and the future is out of our hands eliminates any sense of responsibility or need to analyze.

The dangers and consequences of willfully ignoring hell

Political illiteracy, ignorance, lacking a sense of belonging to the world, and the severe absence of solidarity are dangerous both to those directly affected by tragedies, violence, climate change, famine, and abuse, as well as to those who aren’t. Here are some of the key consequences of collective apathy:

1) Doing nothing

2) The powerful can do what they like

Political apathy facilitates the corruption that lead to it in the first place, allowing those with economic and political power to get away with atrocities and lazy incompetence.

3) Setting a low bar

The more apathetic and passive society is, the lower the bar for what is tolerable is set. At the moment, we tolerate our supposed representatives lying to us, we tolerate a press controlled by commercial interests, we tolerate resources going into the creation of a serious nuclear threat while universal healthcare is apparently too hard, and so on. We’re tolerating extreme maltreatment of refugees in Australia and bombing in the Middle East: it’s hard to imagine the bar getting much lower. What goes unchallenged becomes the norm, and what society considers “normal” is in turn a reflection of the health of that society (rather than the mental healthy of individuals being at all related to their level of deviation from the norm). A society that grumbles “stop being so negative” when an individual dares to note injustice, has low standards for what its people should be entitled to.

4) Apathy and inaction actually makes you feel worse

5) The absence of global and local community

6) Dehumanization isn’t just a cause, but also a consequence of apathy

7) A mentally weak society

8) A meaningless life

A culture of indifference makes for boring conversations, a life lacking in meaning, and a suffocating lack of agency. It’s a stark contrast to my many years in politically-vibrant Venezuela, where there was always something to debate with one’s neighbor, the bus driver, and the arepa seller. Your mind had so many things to turn over, there was never a dull moment, and there were more projects to do and things to attempt than you could handle. Learning and growth – individually and collectively, was constant. Apathy, on the other hand, is a numbness that can go unnoticed until you lose it, as well as being an attitude – a way of life, that is uncreative and tedious.

9) Going through life without hope

We need hope to keep us moving and active. A culture that ignores the suffering of others fosters a feeling that change is impossible, and we go through life embodying that sense of hopelessness.

Doing something about globalized inaction

What if ignoring the world’s problems was the most morally fucked thing a person could do? Would you take two weeks to get politically literate? What does it take to empower people to be part of the solution, rather than through their passivity, being part of the problem?

Stop insisting that politics be kept out of everything. Injustices and politics weaves its way into our every thread of being.

A starting point is to stop insisting that politics be kept out of everything. Injustices and politics weaves its way into our every thread of being – it’s in the soccer game (look at the advertising, look at the gender roles, look at the distribution of money and resources and who makes those decisions), it’s in the shops (who made the clothing and under what conditions, who allocated the land to be used for consumerism rather than health or education). The politics is there, and ignoring it or telling those who don’t to shut up doesn’t make it go away, it just turns you into a willful accomplice of the crimes.

Speaking out lets others know that they can speak out too – it triggers action. Supporting alternative journalism is a way of supporting more organized attempts to break the silence. And reading or listening to reliable, non-corporate, non-US-centric world news on a regular basis is a basic responsibility that all members of the global community have. Talking to others about what you hear then counters the apathy. Standing up to racism, sexist jokes, and other forms of ritualized abuse within our daily interactions is also important and de-normalizes such a culture of disrespect.

Get involved in action, movements, and rallies and do what you can in your context. Put politics (ie fighting injustice) on the agenda in your community or home or workplace. Caring about the world needs to be a natural, integral part of living. This shit is urgent. There’s an earthquake happening right now, all the time – treat it with that urgency and value others who are already doing so.

If politics – struggle, action, and having an opinion – seems pointless, it’s only because we’re allowing it to be.