Our Collective Complicity

The images streaming across our screens have become numbingly familiar: rubble where homes once stood, children’s bodies pulled from collapsed buildings, desperate families fleeing with whatever they can carry, leaders boasting of their resolve while populations are decimated. Gaza. Ukraine. Syria. Myanmar. The list grows, and with it, our capacity for horror paradoxically shrinks. We scroll past atrocities between breakfast and our morning commute, our thumbs already moving toward the next story, the next distraction, the next comfortable forgetting.

This is not the extraordinary evil of cinematic villains. This is what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”—the ordinary people in ordinary offices making ordinary decisions that cascade into extraordinary suffering. It is the bureaucrat processing deportation orders, the soldier following commands, the citizen who shrugs and says “what can I do?” It is, most dangerously, the mass of us who watch and do nothing.

Since Donald Trump’s return to the American presidency, the already fraying consensus around human rights, international law, and democratic norms has accelerated its unravelling. But to blame one man, or even a handful of authoritarian leaders around the globe is to misunderstand the nature of the crisis. These men are symptoms, not causes. They rose because millions chose them, millions more stayed silent, and the rest of us in democratic nations failed to present compelling alternatives to their promises of strength, simplicity, and someone to blame.

The slaughter in Gaza—with casualties exceeding 70,000 in just over a year—represents a moral catastrophe enabled by layers of complicity. It required not just Netanyahu’s orders, but soldiers willing to execute them, legislators voting for weapons, diplomats crafting justifications, media outlets sanitizing language, and global audiences accepting “collateral damage” as the price of someone else’s security. Each layer involves ordinary people making choices they can rationalize: following orders, pursuing national interests, maintaining objectivity, protecting themselves.

This is how genocides happen. Not through sudden eruptions of inexplicable madness, but through incremental normalizations of the unacceptable. First, we accept the dehumanizing rhetoric—they are “terrorists,” “illegal aliens,” “threats to our way of life.” Then we accept the disproportionate responses—collective punishment, family separation, siege tactics. Finally, we accept the logical conclusion of dehumanization: their lives matter less, their children’s deaths are regrettable but necessary, their extinction is self-defence.

The pattern repeats across continents. Major democracies, who used to pride themselves on their pluralistic ethos have been steadily sliding toward majoritarian authoritarianism, with Muslims increasingly treated as second-class citizens in their own countries, enabled by a pliant “Godi Media” that speaks only in the official language of schadenfreude. In Russia, a former KGB operative has reconstructed a surveillance state while waging a war of imperial conquest. In China, an entire ethnic group, the Uyghurs, faces cultural erasure through what amounts to a high-tech gulag system. In Turkey, dissent is criminalized and Kurdish populations are perpetually suspect. Across South America and Central Asia, strongmen consolidate power while institutions crumble and journalists disappear.

What unites these diverse situations is not ideology—these leaders span the political spectrum—but a shared contempt for human dignity and democratic accountability, paired with populations willing to trade freedom for the illusion of security and simplicity. Many have cynically cultivated religious constituencies founded entirely on hate, weaving their political survival around the perpetuation of that hate, making reconciliation itself a threat to their power, in the Marxian dictum of “religion is the opium of the people”. These leaders intoxicate their constituencies with this ‘opium’ for perpetual yield thereafter with intermittent brief hate campaigns as fertiliser. Thus for small investments they reap rich political dividends. What Firaq Gorakhpuri Sahib would describe as: “Har zare par ek qaifiate neem shabi hai. Aye saqiye dhuran yeh gunahoon ki gadi hai”.

The technology of our age amplifies this drift. Social media algorithms reward outrage and tribal signalling, making nuanced thought nearly impossible and empathy for the distant “other” even harder. We inhabit information bubbles where our prejudices are confirmed and our opposition dehumanized. The digital town square, which promised to connect humanity, instead fragments us into warring camps, each convinced of its righteousness, each blind to its complicity.

Meanwhile, the existential threats we should be uniting against—climate collapse, pandemic preparedness, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence governance—languish unaddressed because authoritarians excel at immediate spectacle, not long-term stewardship. We are, quite literally, rearranging deck chairs while the ship takes on water, and the gathering darkness suggests we may already be past the point of easy rescue.

Yet Rabbi Heschel’s words remain profoundly true: “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” This is not a counsel of despair but a call to moral clarity. We cannot control Netanyahu’s decisions or Trump’s impulses or Putin’s ambitions. But we control our own choices: what we speak, what we tolerate, what we support, what we resist.

Responsibility means refusing to become numb. It means learning the names of the dead, not as statistics but as persons. It means calling atrocities by their proper names—ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity—not hiding behind euphemisms. It means supporting organizations that document abuses, journalists who report truth at great personal risk, and civil society groups that maintain threads of connection across divides.

Responsibility means recognizing that “I was just following orders” and “I was just doing my job” and “what could I do?” are precisely the phrases that enable horror. Every act of evil requires a thousand acts of complicity, and every refusal to comply—every whistleblower, every conscientious objector, every citizen who says “not in my name”—makes the next atrocity slightly harder.

History will judge this era harshly. Future generations, if there are any, will ask how we watched the descent and did so little. They will study our Facebook posts and news archives and wonder how we could see so clearly and act so timidly. The question is whether we will have anything to offer them beyond excuses.

The banality of evil persists because ordinary people let it. It will continue until ordinary people stop it. Some are guilty of ordering the bombs and signing the laws and pulling the triggers. But all of us are responsible for the world we create through our action or inaction, our courage or cowardice, our solidarity or silence.

The choice, as it has always been, is ours. The question is whether we will make it before it is too late—if it is not already.