Depraved Indifference in Fascist Times
DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE is a failure-to-act to protect human beings that is so egregious that it fits in the same category as an act perpetrated by individuals with evil intentions.
Most of us have heard various adages about people who come into our lives, our spiritual sphere. The emphases of the sayings nearly always have been on the positive aspects of those who come into our personal domains. We seldom attend to the value of negative, even evil, people. However, negative people properly regarded may teach us beneficial Truths our best friends will not.
Donald Trump forced America to face Truths about our hypocrisy with regard to the Confederate philosophy, and especially our toleration of it over the decades. Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stevens considered Africans to be less than human, sent by their god to serve white people. Trump espoused, and benefited from, searing rhetoric that accentuated White Male Supremacy, racism, misogyny, masculinism, and bastardized Religion.
America’s strong support for treason and Fascism was evinced first on November 8, 2016. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; over 74 million did so in 2020; more than 77 million chose him in 2024, with an increase of 14.3 million votes over 2016; and another 110 million acquiesced to the rise of Fascism by self-disenfranchising in 2024. It is inconceivable that people in our families, affinity groups, workplaces, communities and churches who harbored the “Confederate” philosophy never expressed those sentiments in our presence.
Nothing can corrupt people’s character as thoroughly as the idea that one must never pass moral judgement on others, that one must be tolerant of anything and everything, that our best selves are demonstrated when we steadfastly refrain from openly distinguishing good from evil and abstain from openly expressing our disdain for the latter. In fact, silence – moral agnosticism and indifference in this era may be termed Depraved Indifference.
It is difficult to condemn the prevailing viewpoints of one’s friends and colleagues. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked detested and rejected by them (From Baldwin). If you have witnessed your friends and associates depreciating “other” American’s humanity and their right to constitutional freedoms, and you remained silent, you authenticated their mindsets by toleration, when gentle confrontation may have urged them to consider changing. Every human relationship requires compromises, but we must never compromise with evil.
Truth-tellers, often castigated as Gadflies, are revolutionaries in Fascist times. It requires tremendous courage to impeach the wisdom, virtue, ethics, and actions of those who have been labeled good – good patriots, leaders, politicians, preachers. Gadflies historically have been severely detested — Socrates, Galileo, Copernicus and Jesus.
MY BROTHERS’/SISTERS’ KEEPER: The death of human empathy is one of the earliest signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism. – Hannah Arendt
Any form of ineffectiveness, misfeasance, malfeasance, deliberately bad intentions, or good intentions gone awry in a nation’s basic institutions, particularly governmental entities, will harm people in the lowest socio-economic echelons disproportionately.
Fascist governments brutally persecute historically oppressed groups. We see ample evidence of this by Trumpists in their abuses against indigenous people, women, the poor, and descendants of slaves. The common oppressors of these groups are the same – America’s White Supremacists/Fascists.
Descendants of the oppressed groups, who through hard work and opportune circumstances, have risen above White Supremacists’ educational, economic, political, and social obstacles, may feel untouchable by Fascism; and, for a while, they may be, even in a Full-Blown Fascist America.
We the privileged few may be separated from our unfortunate counterparts geographically, but, nevertheless, we are still connected with them – children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, for example. They may be out of our sight, but they will never be out of our subconscious, spiritual minds. Eventually, their increasing pain will inflict us also.
Some violations committed against human beings– verbal, physical, psychological or spiritual – are so reprehensible that we define ourselves as reprehensible if we commit such acts, surely, but also if we remain silent when such violations occur anywhere. Silence about our government’s harm to our fellow citizens morphs easily into Depraved Indifference and Civic Irresponsibility.
We are a hair’s breadth from full-blown Fascism. There are about 100 days until the most important midterms in American history – November 3. Voting still matters. In 2016, 112,000 votes, 0.03% of the population, put Trump into office. If you have been tolerant and indifferent in recent years, which enabled Trump’s increasingly despotic reign, and want redemption, there is no need to shout it from rooftops. You can quietly, surreptitiously, help save America with two simple steps – First, resolve intractably to vote in the midterms; and, Second, talk with people in your sphere of influence about the importance of voting, without telling them for whom they should vote.
