Indifference — The Death of the Spirit and the Meaning of Life

Perhaps the most painful thing visible in the images released after the hacking of Evin Prison’s cameras is not the violence itself, but the general indifference of prison staff toward events unfolding before their eyes every day. Some personnel and soldiers beat prisoners and drag them across the ground; a cleric passes indifferently beside a prisoner who has collapsed on a staircase; and staff in the control room watch all of these images day after day on their screens and carry the memory of them home at night.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, in the Persian rendering preserved here, that ideology enables people not only to accept violence, cruelty and evil and become indifferent to them, but to commit them with a calm conscience while continuing to feel in their hearts that they are good people. They are affirmed by those who think like them, and this companionship removes the loneliness they might otherwise experience before the evil they commit.

As long as they have not personally committed the crime, they defend cruelty and wrongdoing with an easy conscience by telling themselves that the higher and sacred aims of their system, party or ideology are more important than the violence and crimes they see with their own eyes. They diminish and trivialise what they see. They justify themselves by saying, “Nothing happened; it is like this everywhere, and elsewhere it is even worse,” or “The person who suffered or lost their life was not entirely innocent; in the end, no one is innocent enough not to deserve some punishment.” At the next stage, when the time comes, they discover within themselves the ability to move from silent witness and approving observer to active perpetrator without ever seeing the darkness that has swallowed their own soul.

For people who believe in this way, the publication of such images is interpreted as an attempt to damage their sacred beliefs. They do not reflect that, whatever the motives of the group that hacked and released the footage, the act of revealing it is not itself destruction, because destruction rests on falsifying truth, whereas what stands before us here is a truth that without concession puts our moral courage into question.

But they are not alone in their indifference. We stand beside them too. They are indifferent to human suffering because they possess a larger justification for themselves; many of us are indifferent because we do not see within ourselves the power to act.

We watch such images and say to ourselves: I already knew this. Who does not know? Things much worse than this happen. And this knowing becomes sufficient reason for us to pass by indifferently. Or we tell ourselves: what can I, one person, possibly do?

There are many things we know but continually hide from ourselves because they do not confront us openly and directly in our daily lives. Yet there are moments when decay and darkness show themselves without a mask, stare directly into our eyes, and ask whether we are ready to walk past them and, perhaps for the last time and forever, bury the voice of truth beneath our silence.

Each of us has a reason for justifying our indifference: the belief that we knew all along, or the claim that nothing can be done. Some of us are “only following orders”; some believe that, for reasons of larger expediency, the matter should not be addressed; some make evil so small that eventually it can find a home inside our own hearts. Yet in the end the result is the same. We become gateways through which decay and darkness enter and expand in our world because, in the depths of our hearts, we do not truly believe in truth or in its power.

The opposite of courage is never fear, but indifference.
The opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference.
The opposite of faith is not doubt; again, it is indifference.
The opposite of hope is not despair; it too is indifference.
And finally, the opposite of life is not death, but our indifference to the world in which we live.

Indifference is the greatest enemy of the human spirit. It stands against life and everything that gives life meaning, emptying both us and the world of courage and truth.

In one of the greatest masterpieces of literary history, Dante, in the Divine Comedy, has Virgil say during the journey through Hell, in the Persian rendering preserved here:
At the entrance to Hell dwell souls defeated by their own pain—people whom Heaven will not accept and whom Hell itself is ashamed to receive. These are people who lived their lives in indifference and are condemned to be forgotten, as though they had never lived upon the earth.