Apathy

"I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn."
- Leo Buscaglia

If there is anything worse than being evil or hateful, it is blind, unthinking apathy. Ignorance, apathy and a lack of thought is the weapon by which bad acts are enacted. Without the parochial masses, there will be no means for those capable of evil to exact their intentions. In essence, one who is capable of hate still has the propensity for taking a stand and, by virtue of that, can then be convinced with rationality and reason. Attacking the opinions of such a person will still evoke a thinking response.

"Apathy is the slow poison coursing through the body politic that paves the way to tyranny."
- Laurence Overmire

But the one who is apathetic and unthinking has no such thought logic. Being devoid of a want for deeper clarification and understanding of things leaves much room for the inability to be properly enlightened, resulting in behaviour that follows the crowd without rootedness in objective morals. Such an unenlightened state leads one and many to the ills of dispassionateness, erosion of tradition and consumerism. And in such an apathetic state of mind, there is little propensity for genuine guilt should one commit an act of evil, other than guilt you have been told to experience in order to make yourself seem like a normal person, an emotional response adopted in a bid to belong to the normal order of the world.

Apathy is the basis of blind faith for those who do not bother to seek beyond the lines and colours of what they see. When pressed for reasons, they will only have textbook answers, beyond which there is often nothing else but shrugs or emotional states of defensiveness.

Stripped of the tangible, material ropes that anchor these parochials to some popularly held state of mind, they are left with nothing. And with disgust, they can be watched as they stray aimlessly until they locate and leech themselves to some other reasonably attractive truth, axiom or following; intellect and responsibility exchanged for comfort, security and a sense of self defined by someone else.




"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes

Audio Candy:
Feist - Let It Die