Silent indifference: A reflection on society’s apathy

There is a video circulating on the internet. In the video you can see a classroom, a professor and students sitting. The professor asks a student to leave the class. The girl, confused, asks why, while the professor gets stern and repeats that she has to leave. The student stands up and leaves. No one else in the room reacts.

After the girl leaves, the professor asks the rest of the class if what he just did was right and fair. The students say no to both. Then the professor breaks down the obvious for them: that if our self-interest is not affected, we will not react to what is happening next to us, even if it is wrong and/or unfair.

The consolidation of the blatant indifference with which citizens have been increasingly transformed in recent years into observers of the mutation of social morality, as if they were not part of it and, even worse, as if they did not bear responsibility for its outcome, is truly infuriating. Everyone discusses it behind closed doors, anonymously on the internet, outside the school gates, in the coffee shop. But when it comes time to put a name to a position, the silence breaks bones. In small communities, where, for better or worse, we all know more or less what goes on behind our neighbors’ doors, this silence is more pronounced, but also more shameful.

I wonder if each of us offered a little bit of love and a little bit of care as a sign of a simple desire to transform this society into a body of which we want to be members, how different this world could be

What is the quality or set of qualities that, when combined, produce the same result? I wonder. How is it possible that a parent can throw his child out on the street and while everyone knows about it, no one takes a stand? How is it possible that a teacher, with all the authority his position gives him, can insult the students in his classroom and no parent complains? Why does everyone claim to know about the torture of innocent animals in a neighborhood, but no one dares to complain?

Again, the root of evil may be a lack of love and concern for what is outside of us. For that which is outside the door of our home, outside the fence of our yard, that which concerns people outside our family environment, that which does not touch our pocket.

I wonder if each of us offered a little bit of love and a little bit of care as a sign of a simple desire to transform this society into a body of which we want to be members, connected to the rest of the body, and if we offered that little bit selflessly and without a second thought of how different this world could be. I wonder how much more warmth would surround people’s hearts and how much more joy would surround us all.

Marina-Selini Katsaiti is associate professor and chair of the Department of Regional and Economic Development at the Agricultural University of Athens.