Every time we remain silent...

What do we do when wrongdoing, untruth and injustice happen before our eyes? When our manager humiliates or wrongs a colleague at work, how do we respond?

We may remain silent so that our own position is not endangered and so that similar treatment does not fall upon us. But the truth is this:

“With every silence from us, that manager becomes a little bolder and more powerful, while we become a little more fearful, submissive and weak—and untruth and injustice become a little stronger in the world in which we live.”

With every silence we feel greater humiliation within ourselves. We bend a little further and lose some of our respect for ourselves.

With every silence, darkness governs the world one step further, and untruth, lies and fear become the dominant culture of our homes, workplaces and society.

Every silence increases the possibility of our next silence. Every act of indifference makes us more indifferent; every time we bow, we move closer to becoming a dark ghost of ourselves, increasingly resembling shadows that have blended into the darkness.

Often we pretend that we have accepted and believed something that in our hearts we know to be false. By lying to ourselves in this way, we gradually lose our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, both within ourselves and in the external world.

Every time we remain silent before the simplest untruths we encounter in daily life and pass over them indifferently, we move towards a point at which what eventually appears unnatural will be truth rather than the lie.

Our self-respect declines. Listlessness and depression weaken us. We move from hatred of the lie to mockery of truth.

The image above is of August Landmesser, a man who many years after his death became a symbol of people unwilling to surrender themselves to darkness or truth to falsehood.

The image can be read as a symbol of courage and resistance, yet in truth the only thing he is doing is refusing to surrender himself to a lie that he knows in his heart to be a lie.

The spirit of the image can be expressed through the statement attributed to Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

“The first step of a courageous human being is not to surrender to the lie of their society.”

Aydin Areta