Indifferentism

“ The influences tending to create dissimilarity, which, in our day at least, are at work, without a moment's intermission, from the cradle to the grave, are incessantly neutralised in each successive generation. ”

“ This world, too, is certainly a world of incongruities, and the more I see of it, the more I am biased in that way of reflection; and if any one will take the trouble to look at things as they are, abstractedly, and observe how good, bad and indifferent, black, white and blue, are jumbled together, he will not deny me his assent. ”

“ Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? ”

“ Its general tendency is to weaken in man his inborn sense of personal independence; to debase his mind with notions of fictitious inferiority; to degrade his social dignity by inducing sycophantic and obsequious habits ”

“ If, in the last Place, we consider the Nature of an indifferent Intention, we shall find that it destroys the Merit of a good Action; abates, but never takes away, the Malignity of an evil Action; and leaves an indifferent Action in its natural State of Indifference. ”

“ The prejudices which seemed so foolish, so false, are interwoven, blended with life itself. We, here, call them instincts, holding us apart from the lower order of man, and my education only fostered, developed them to the utmost in me. ”

“ Having divided existence, then, into two distinct kinds, the next question is, To what account do we propose turning the discrimination? If it is of no practical use in removing difficulties and in throwing light upon the obscurer phenomena of man, it is worthless, and must be discarded as a barren and mere hair-splitting refinement. ”

“ The externalism in which most of our lives are spent makes the effort to look within a painful contradiction of habit. When it is attempted pride and prejudice face the inquirer, and too often [233] quite hide the true self from view. ”

“ We need only to reflect a little on the conditions of human existence; on the urgent demand which material necessities inevitably make on so immense a proportion of our time and thought; on the space which is naturally filled up by the activity of absorbing affections; on the fatal power of mere tradition and report over the indifferent, and the fatal power of inveterate prejudice over so many even of the best of those who are not indifferent. ”

“ Above all, we are divided man against man. We are split into parties and factions, by greed and jealousies, petty spites and self-seeking, by unintelligence, by education, and by our inability—a mental inability—‘to see life steadily and see it whole,’ and lastly, perhaps chiefly, by our intense egotisms, both physical and intellectual. ”

“ One casts one's afflictions, and, under certain circumstances, even one's baseness, in the teeth of those who are different, as if their condition were an injustice, an iniquitous privilege. "Since I am a blackguard you ought to be one too." ”

“ May we not suspect that we are making differences of kind, because we are unable to imagine differences of degree?—putting the whole human race into heaven or hell for the greater convenience of logical division? ”

“ Were there such spots of indifference, the rigorous determinists think, the future and the past would be separated absolutely, for, ABSTRACTLY TAKEN, THE WORD 'INDIFFERENT' SUGGESTS DISCONNECTION SOLELY. Whatever is indifferent is in so far forth unrelated and detached. ”

“ Would it not, Marinelli?
MARINELLI. Certainly, certainly.
ORSINA (with a scornful look) . Certainly! What an oracle, who can be made to say what one pleases! Indifference in the place of love!--That means nothing in the place of something. For learn, thou mimicking court-parrot, learn from a woman, that indifference is but an empty word, a mere sound which means nothing. The mind can only be indifferent to objects of which it does not think; to things which for itself have no existence. Only indifferent for a thing that is nothing--that is as much as saying not indifferent. ”

“ This constant suggestion of inferiority has done much to keep the colored [Pg 179] race back, because it has added tremendously to their sense of real or fancied inferiority and has been a discouragement to their efforts to make themselves the equals of those who look down upon them.
We can not help being influenced by other people's opinion of us. It makes us, according to its nature, think more or less of ourselves, of our ability. We are similarly affected by our environment. We unconsciously take on the superiority or inferiority of our surroundings. ”

“ Now, if we consider how very precarious their mode of subsistance is, how devoted they are to superstition and prejudice, we—such of us as know more about them—we, I say, may wonder how they stand out so well. Very many instances I have known seem to be far beyond the power of human nature to stand. ”

“ So too one’s views of life, of the meaning of social phenomena, and of the general rules for men to pursue with each other, undergo a recasting. Now during this process, men diverge and break up. They do not agree. They differ by less and more, and also by the various recombinations of the factors which they make. Pride, vanity, and self-seeking come in to increase this divergence, it being regarded as a sign of independence of thought.
It is not too much to say that so long as this divergence exists, it is a sign of a low and imperfect development of science. ”

“ In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. ”

“ Not Gnekker's or Liza's action frightens me, but the indifference with which I receive the news of their marriage. Men say that philosophers and true savants are indifferent. It is untrue. Indifference is the paralysis of the soul, premature death. ”

“ But if we established ourselves in the minds of your normal people, we'd be without will. As mere observers, we'd become assimilated in time, and thus extinguished as a separate race. That, of course, we could not permit. And if we settled in the minds most suitable to receive us, we would be in the minds of those who by your standards are insane—whose destiny is controlled by the others. ”

“ Delawarr whom I hear say, that consistency is a prejudice and conduct to be ruled by convenience? Opinions may change with the circumstances on which they were founded, but principles never. Either your whole past life has been a lie, or else your present conduct. The high and warm feelings your youth, matured by the convictions of manhood—all that a whole life has held to be right—cannot, surely, in the experience of a few days, be utterly wrong. ”

“ The only real trouble with you Earth people is that you have a tremendous inferiority complex, collectively and individually—as you’ve just illustrated. Get over that and you’ll eliminate most of your trouble. ”

“ Every suggestion of inferiority is contagious, and helps to swerve the life from its possibilities.
Every influence in our environment is a suggestion which becomes a part of us. If we live with people who lack ambition, who are slovenly, slipshod, or with people of loose morals, of low flying ideals, we tend to reflect their qualities. If we mingle much with those who use slangy, vulgar, incorrect English, people who are not careful about their manners or their expression, these things will reappear in our own conversation and manners. ”

“ Must not the character be thoroughly depraved before the scorn of our neighbours shall become indifferent? Indifference, flowing from a sense of justice, and a persuasion that our treatment is unmerited, is characteristic of the noblest minds ”

“ His faults when studied without prejudice are seen to be primarily the faults of ignorance and inexperience, of instinctive preference of idealism and sentiment to realism, and of unschooled, easily offended individualism. ”

“ This is perhaps more peculiarly the case among those who live little in the world, and whose daily sayings and doings are chiefly confined to the narrow circle of home. But yet it is singular how long this prejudice for perhaps it deserves no better name can stand the conflict of actual life. ”

“ For if it be true that the distinction we are contending for be merely a dead analytical discrimination, and not a real and wonder-working antithesis, a vital antagonism in human nature which, practically operating, brings about all the good and evil of man and of society ”

“ No sharper contrast can be imagined than that between the profound and exclusive attention which each person devotes to his own self, and the indifference with which, as a rule, all other people regard that self, - an indifference precisely like that with which lie in turn looks upon them. ”

“ Child of indifference, of ignorance, of prejudice, of selfishness, it seeks to maintain things precisely as they are, deprecates every change, and, disregarding the transitory condition of all that is human, blindly prays for the perpetuity of existing institutions. Such an influence is productive of disorder rather than order, and is destructive rather than justly conservative. ”

“ Who that claims there is exaggeration is fitted by his lack of prejudice to do the work of separation?
Is it not true that the claim of exaggeration is merely an assumption, and based entirely upon preconceived theories of critics whose opinions vary with their prejudices? ”

“ He has a certain odour of bad company that almost imperils his distinction. This was doubtless the deepest of the reasons why among ourselves he flourished so scantly: we felt ourselves to be of a world in which the elements were differently mixed, the proportions differently marked, so that the tables of our law would have to be differently graven. ”

“ This is the explanation of a remark once made by one of our Masters, when referring to the cruelty and superstition shown by the great mass of humanity: “They have individualized too soon; they are not yet worthy of the human form.” ”

“ The collective aura of the people was as serene and indifferent as ever.
I have come to think more kindly of our people's pathetic indifference, because I am sure it is the indifference of very young souls, who have passed through but few incarnations, and "know not what they do." ”

“ Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position, discarding our standard that we have left us. ”

“ By indifference, as used by the writers here ridiculed, in a popular sense, is evidently meant the want of personal or physical interest in any object, and to say that this necessarily implies the want of every other kind of interest in it, of all rational desire of the good of others, is a meagre assumption of the point in dispute. ”

“ To be indifferent—even this is a form of strength—for that, likewise, we are too senile, too decrepit: our morality of fellow-feeling, against which I was the first to raise a finger of warning, that which might be called moral impressionism, is one symptom the more of the excessive physiological irritability which is peculiar to everything decadent. ”

“ To sum up: the stranger whom we feel to be divergent as compared with ourselves is indifferent or the object of prejudice; the stranger whom we feel ourselves unable to measure by our own standard, whose measure—not his qualities—we feel to be different, we receive with prestige. We look with prejudice on the stranger whom we dissociate, and receive with prestige the stranger who is dissociated. ”

“ Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities. ”

“ From the standpoint here outlined, prejudice or its analogue is the starting-point, and our question becomes one of the determination of the steps of the process by which man mentally allied with himself certain portions of his environment to the exclusion of others. ”

“ In the eyes of the Supreme Being, with whom innate and unreasoning disgust is not a factor, the instincts of the normal man and of the invert are on a par morally and æsthetically. There is no ground for the charge that the passive invert's practices are aimed at the very existence of the race. ”

“ Individualism, separatism, self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence, are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone ”

“ No less clear is it that the transition from indifferent acts to acts which are good or bad is gradual. If a friend who is with me has explored the sea-shore, but has not seen the waterfall, the choice of one or other end is no longer ethically indifferent. ”

“ Watch the growing arrogance of the dominant people; watch their demands for deference, their lust for flattery, their irritation at the least sign of independence, their contempt for the race whose obeisance they delight in, their rudeness of manner increasing till it becomes incredible to the relatives they left at home, and would once have been incredible to themselves. ”