If Silence is Complicity, Then Ignorance is Freedom

Liberation via insulation

I fear for anyone caught between what they know and what they don’t yet know that they don’t know. - Welcome to Night Vale

I've seen the quote memes on Facebook and the tweets. The failure to vocalize my opposition to the bad stuff is to tacitly condone it and the systems which produce it. Silence is complicity with the status quo. Anytime I encounter inequity, the argument goes, I must loudly condemn it and use what resources I have to promote progress. As a socially conscious person, I endorse this message wholeheartedly. History is replete with the moral weakness of those who could have remedied injustice but failed to act for selfish reasons. I dread ever joining their ranks or partaking in their complicit silence while facing the problems of today.

This noble disdain for complicit silence comes at a cost, however. Practically every time I go online or turn on the TV I inadvertently discover that I am implicated in yet another social injustice. All of my feeds now - social media, news, podcasts, etc. - consist predominantly of updates about problems in the world. Every time I learn about The New Issue, I am immediately confronted by an unfamiliar form of complicit silence. Knowledge of The New Issue necessarily imparts the burden of choosing how to respond to it in an adequately non-complicit manner. The unsolicited conferral of moral responsibility temporarily hijacks my ability to retain my sense of myself as a good person and holds it hostage until I decide how to comprehend and react to the problem. This challenge usually requires significant investment on my part. Only when I speak out properly am I re-established.

My deep commitment to overcoming complicit silence seriously constrains my mental freedom. I fear psychic abduction by The New Issue for the entailed negotiation distracts from what I have going on - my goals and projects and responsibilities. It steals my identity and demands ransom on a whim. Not long ago, I realized that, to protect myself, I had to reconcile my disavowal of complicit silence with my autonomy. I found a solution predicated on the simple observation that I can only bear the moral burden of complicit silence if I am aware of that about which I could be silent. The existence of the things about which I am silently complicit is contingent upon my knowing about them. If I never learned about the existence of something about which I would be silently complicit, if it never crystallized as a thing in my mind, then I never could be silently complicit about it. I cannot be silent about nothing; I cannot be anything about nothing.

Once you recognize this, you reach a strange truth: If silence is complicity, then ignorance is freedom. But not just any ignorance. Not ignorance in the “I’m aware of that but I choose to ignore it” sense. This variety offers no moral protection against complicit silence. Only a more profound ignorance that insulates from exposure to objects capable of being ignored works. If I cannot become aware of issues about which I am not currently aware, then I can never acquire the knowledge which necessitates that I labor to maintain my sense of myself as a good, non-complicit person. By embracing ignorance and closing myself off from information sources, I can liberate myself from the burden of overcoming complicit silence while maintaining my moral position as non-complicit. I can free myself from the potential knowing of things that, once known, demand decision or inflict complicity. And I can do this without becoming complicit with any of the bad stuff.

Some readers will observe disgustedly how privileged one must be to embrace ignorance like I do. The oppressed lack the resources necessary to access this option, they will argue. I could not agree more, which is why I envy the disadvantaged. Everyone, even the underprivileged, reinforces at least one inequitable social system. No one is perfectly aware of all of the harms they directly or indirectly perpetuate. But the materially underprivileged who lack the time, education, technology, and/or information required to attain awareness of matters about which they would be silently complicit enjoy the radical moral freedom of unchosen ignorance. Those without access to the choice of ignorance possess the moral privilege of not even having to choose ignorance to avoid the perpetually looming specter of silent complicity. Their sense of themselves as morally non-complicit goes unchallenged day to day. If only I were so lucky!

Many today suffer under the tyranny of resistance. If your moral commitment to speaking out burdens you, if the constant self-questioning your virtue invokes jeopardizes your well being, I recommend opting for ignorance. If you 1) acknowledge that you can only be silently complicit with something if you know about it and 2) structure your environment such that you can avoid learning things about which you would be silently complicit, you can retain both your moral character and your freedom. (This depends, of course, on whether you are properly speaking out against the injustices about which you are already aware.)

If you live your life constantly uncovering novel manifestations of your silent complicity and developing your reactions, you soon will not have a life you can truly call yours at all. You won’t have any time to do the things that make you who you are because you will be spending it all in the effort to embody resistance. Retain yourself; choose ignorance.