Why good people look away from global violence

M Nadarajah

How can well-educated, ethically articulate individuals be silent or worse, comfortable when atrocities are happening?

A dominant current in Western intellectual culture, which has shaped the societies of the Global South, offers an explanation. It has continually privileged the development of the private self and individualism – comfort, aesthetic refinement, professional belonging, personal growth – over the uncomfortable demands of community or solidarity with the oppressed.

In this worldview, the Ubuntu maxim “I am because we are” simply does not count.

This has given rise to what might be called “prisons of peaceful conformity” – spaces in which people might experience moral engagement through private virtue, but remain outside the public sphere and divorced from political responsibility for the wars, famines, genocides and structural injustices perpetrated in their name, directly and indirectly.

Erich Fromm, the German-American psychologist and social philosopher, called this the “flight from freedom” – the tendency for people to surrender moral agency for the safety of adhering to the prevailing system.

It connects to another idea embedded in progressive Western intellectual culture: the “banality of evil”. The German-born Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt made this argument in 1963, having attended the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem two years earlier.

She argued that ordinary individuals, merely following orders and operating within bureaucratic institutions, can commit great crimes. Monstrosity is not necessarily designed by inherently bad individuals. It is fed by ordinary people who internalise quiet conformity and immoral professionalism in the face of great violence.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, writing from the horror of Nazi concentration camps, observed that withdrawal into the private self fostered a capacity for self-deception that allowed mass atrocity to develop with the assent of educated, “civilised” society.

Can we escape our moral responsibility? The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, in his perceptive idea of “interbeing”, implicates everyone who stays mute in the face of tyranny. Silence is not a non-activity but a kind of action. To break out of this irresponsible silence, we need to be ready to sit with discomfort rather than retreat into the carefully manicured comfort of the private realm.

The culture of destructive growth

No pattern in this ecosystem is more materially relevant than the profit-oriented growth model that dominates global economics.

Western industrial capitalism sees perpetual accumulation and resource extraction not as one choice among many, but as the obvious purpose of organised human life and society.

The repercussions are not hard to trace. Much of the Global South — its forests, rivers, agricultural and mineral-rich regions – has been destroyed to feed Northern industrial and consumer lifestyles.

The gap between what a person in the Global North consumes and what a person in the Global South consumes reveals the violence embedded in everyday life.

Transnational corporations, backed by geopolitical and financial organisations, continue to extract minerals, fossil fuels, timber and agricultural commodities with little regard for local communities or the environment.

This dispossession and alienation were structurally inevitable, as the German social philosopher Karl Marx was among the first to recognise.

What neither he nor his detractors fully foresaw was the ecological and communal catastrophe this would produce at planetary scale.

This is colonial extractivism wrapped in the guise of progress and free markets:  creating dependency, eroding sustainable alternatives and mortgaging the future of generations not yet born.

It is a model that makes many people miserable not only in the Global South, but also in the Global North, where an expanding number of working people and their communities have become equally disposable.

Disciplinary cultures and knowledge silos

One of the quietest and most effective ways this system sustains itself is the institutionalised partition of knowledge into locked academic silos – economics, law, philosophy, medicine, sociology, religion and so on. Each has its own internal coherence, its own vocabulary, its own standards of excellence.

The result of this hegemony of disciplinarity is a trained blindness to the systemic implications of the whole.

This plays out in telling ways.

Economists predict growth without acknowledging dispossession, ecological degradation or the unpaid labour of millions of women and communities holding life together at the periphery.

Lawyers talk about rights without probing the basic exclusions built into those rights: who counts as a legal person, whose land is “empty”, whose pain is worth compensating.

Philosophers theorise dignity in exquisite abstraction without addressing the empires that fund their colleges and print their books.

Medical systems treat bodies while ignoring the poverty, pollution and oppression that made those bodies sick in the first place.

The outcome is a vast edifice of expertise in which everyone is technically proficient and no one is morally answerable to the whole.

Ivan Illich, the Austrian philosopher and social critic best known for the term “deschooling”, argued that modern professions not only fragment information but also disqualify ordinary people from trusting their own understanding of their life, their body, their society and their destiny.

Instead, the expert becomes the gatekeeper, the ordinary person the customer while accountability disappears into procedural purity. The result, he warned, is an “expertocracy” driving us towards our own demise.

What is lost in this fragmentation is precisely what the world most needs: integrated, relational, morally accountable thinking. It is a thinking that does not just ask: does this work within its own logic? It also asks: what does this do to people, to communities, to the living earth, to those with no voice at the table?

Indigenous knowledge traditions, meditative practices and participatory community inquiry have always embodied this wholeness. They were never divided into disciplines because they never sought to separate the knower from the known, the thinker from the community, the idea from its repercussions.

The remedy is not merely interdisciplinarity – rearranging the same segregated elements in a different configuration. Growing in the West, and gaining ground in the Global South, is “transdisciplinarity”: a mode of knowing that refuses disciplinary boundaries altogether.

This mode insists on holding the systemic picture, drawing together lived experience, ecological reality, spiritual wisdom and critical analysis into a genuinely integrated encounter with the world.

Narrative hegemony

This globalised ecosystem of violence and silence reaches into one final, increasingly urgent domain: the production and management of story itself.

Dominant narratives about history, progress, conflict and legitimacy are transmitted worldwide via concentrated control of major media outlets, cultural industries and digital infrastructures. These are continually structured to justify hegemonic interests and present the existing order as natural.

Those who contest this hegemony – indigenous, abolitionist, socialist and anti-colonial voices – are often labelled as extremists or irrational actors and denied credence. In the worst circumstances, builders of counter-narratives face targeted harassment, disappearances or legal repression.

Meanwhile, digital surveillance, algorithmic filtering and cyber interventions expand this control, suppressing dissenting content and fragmenting communities of resistance.

But narrative power has never been total. Community radio, independent media, oral storytelling, social movements and internet solidarity networks have long created counter-narrative spaces.

Dismantling this repressive framework is more than just generating alternative content. It calls for the reclaiming of media sovereignty, the protection of truth-tellers and the promotion of intercultural discourse – spaces that allow marginalised communities to speak their own stories, in their own voices, without fear.

Restructuring thought, emotion and action

The “globalised ecosystem of violence and silence” is an interconnected, mutually reinforcing ecology of ideas, emotions and practices that not only tolerates suffering but structurally organises it.

Each pattern feeds the others. Presenting one culture’s values as universal truth shuts out other ways of knowing. That shutdown hides the West’s ethical double standards, which feed the belief that Western “progress” is humanity’s only destination.

Unfortunately, this belief turns real people into abstractions. Abstraction then drives us inward, away from collective responsibility for what is happening.

This retreat makes profit-driven growth possible. All the while, fragmented knowledge prevents accountability, and narrative control ensures the whole system keeps reproducing itself.

Yet, this terrible system created by poor human decisions can be dismantled by human courage and compassion.

This reality is hard, hurtful and at times dangerous to face. It is far easier and much more socially acceptable to blame individuals: tyrants, companies or rogue states.

The scarier thing is to see systemic harm woven into the very way we have been trained to think, feel, act and imagine the future. Recognition is the very beginning of real freedom.

The first act of transformation is to name the world as it actually is. For this, we need to be not only clear but also compassionate.

It does not require a perfect theory or an imminent revolution. It starts whenever someone refuses to remain comfortable with their own ignorance and begins asking: who profits from this arrangement? Who is hurt? And what would I have to give away to make things change?

The world does not need a better version of the same system. It demands a radical reorganisation of thought, emotion, action and imagination – one that draws on the depth and plurality of human wisdom traditions, puts the dignity and agency of the marginalised at the centre, and recognises that the Earth itself is a community to which we belong as a small part, not a resource we possess.

This is not utopia. It is the oldest, most enduring wisdom of our species –suppressed but never destroyed, alive wherever people choose to stand in solidarity rather than silence.

Dr M Nadarajah is a sociologist by training and an Asian Public Intellectual/Nippon Foundation) fellow. He is based in Thiruvananthapuram, India.

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