Indifference is the universal destroyer of the human spirit

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." — Eli Wiesel

One can imagine how the indifference of his former friends and neighbors, and even the allied world to his arrest and deportation would come to influence Eli Wiesel.

As a youthful Jewish survivor of the Holocaust that took members of his family, he saw and suffered firsthand the consequences of indifference. In his lament, he covers the whole spectrum of life, from love — the basic human quality that propels our lives and shapes our moods — to the limits of our mortality, defined by the markers of death. In between, art creates within us a finer being, not through cognition but through the emotions. Faith, fundamental in all our hopes and beliefs, is also an intangible. Indifference, then, is the universal destroyer of the whole human spirit.

The absence of caring best describes an inanimate rock rather than a living, breathing, thinking, feeling person. In scriptural terms, the lack of emotional commitment, being neither hot nor cold, or being past feeling, was the sin. One may act or even fight valiantly for something, but if sensitivity to the consequences of this behavior is absent, then that is the same damning indifference.

In biology, there is built into the severest forms of depression a numbness that can be so profound one has to feel better even to have the agony to commit suicide. Others cease to sense from the emotional neutering of fear.

It is the absence of both emotion and action that Wiesel denounces. For him, indifference is even greater than death.

So what moves us to this state of not caring? The lack of engagement of humans into society comes often with biological explanations. We become indifferent out of self-preservation and as a numbed reaction to the complexity and chaos around us.

It is the indifference to hate and human suffering that is fostered by self-survival that permits a society like the Germans of the 1930s to gradually accept mass murder.

"They first came for the communists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,