The Sin of Indifference

The daughter of a high-school colleague of mine was taken away from her by the CPS in Norway some twelve years back. The allegations against my friend were pure hyperbole. Yet it held up in court, and my friend and her daughter have been separated ever since. The court case was a sham with experts that have since been convicted of corruption, including trafficking in in under-aged children. But none of this made any difference to my friend's battle to get her daughter back.

One of the more shocking aspects of this was the extent to which my friend's other high-school friends remained silent. There was no engagement. Not even a few words of comfort and support.

I was especially disappointed in a mutual friend who I always held to be both intelligent and morally upright. With so much corruption on open display, I had expected at least a few words from him on the matter. But there was nothing but silence. When I brought the situation up with him in private, he dismissed it as unimportant. It was none of his business and a waste of time.

Yet, when the vaccine was rushed to market this spring, this same friend decides to share a wildly positive and clearly false post about the vaccine for no good reason at all.

I challenged my friend on the facts, and he had to admit that the post was excessively positive. But this was for the greater good. Distributing the vaccine was the right thing to do. He continued actively promoting the vaccine among his friends and relatives, and he took it himself as soon as he could. Never did it occur to him that there might be something nefarious going on.

Having engaged myself in the case of my friend's daughter, I was fully aware of the extent to which government has been corrupted. This made me in turn unimpressed by government propaganda, and I've avoided the vaccine. A consequence of this is that I sleep soundly at night. Engagement in my friend's plight has been rewarded with peace of mind.

However, my vaccine promoting friend is increasingly nervous about things these days. Uncertainty is setting in. There's doubt and paranoia. I'm sure he's finding it hard to sleep soundly at night. Having engaged in the sin of indifference, he fell for the propaganda. He became a willing pawn in their game, and now he's facing the consequences. Not only is his future health in jeopardy, his friends are in danger too, and it's all due to his insistence on taking the vaccine, including baseless propaganda that he actively circulated for the express purpose of getting as many of his friends vaccinated as possible.

This is the difference between sin and virtue. It's not the action itself that leads to reward or punishment. Indifference doesn't lead directly to hell. Hell appears later as a consequence of the numbness to reality that indifference spawns. Similarly, engagement may not yield much reward in the short term. But it primes us for future events, and that's when we avoid the wrong path, and we are rewarded with peace of mind.

Navigare necesse est

By Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library NZ on The Commons - originally posted to Flickr as Ship Garthsnaid, ca 1920s, Public Domain, Link