The Archive of Free Thinking

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.”

John Stuart Mill

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Despite our imperative to deny the ‘triumph of evil’, all too often we allow ourselves to remain politically and socially inert; convincing ourselves that it is permissible – if not outright necessary – to avoid engaging with political activation. This issue of non-participation is too nebulous to address every facet at once, and so here we will consider the narratology of disempowerment, its role and function; what Mills calls the pacifying ‘delusion’. Narratology is the study of narratives. It considers the structure and patterns in stories and, more broadly, ‘how humans use stories as sense-making instruments’. We shall first look at the reasons people may ‘take no part, and form no opinion’, recognising the purpose and importance of these narrative ‘delusions’, before analysing their origins and consequences. In doing so we can begin to see why it is so important to believe in our own political capacity, as well as the very serious ‘harm’ that can come when we defect on our responsibility to ‘take part’.

In order to fully understand the myths of political disengagement, we must first understand the relation between political narratives and objective reality. In simple terms, this means that there are multiple ways in which we comprehend and communicate reality. Think about the slightly different meanings communicated in a phrase like “there are 50 people on this bus”, versus “this bus is packed”. The subjective shared amongst enough people and repeated across time eventually reaches a kind of critical mass and is transformed into a ‘narrative’, conventional wisdom, a myth. The reason for spending time articulating the difference between these layers is to make it clear that buying into the ‘pacifying delusions’ of social narratives is not inherently problematic. It is a normal and natural process we use to manage large amounts of information across time and space and is often useful, accurate or both. Furthermore, it would be naive to argue that political action is without risk. Enacting significant change is frequently very difficult, dangerous, messy, slow and uncertain. Pretending otherwise would be just another false narrative. Instead, by accepting the legitimacy of risk analysis we can start to address the problem practically and honestly, and therefore far more effectively. The point is to acknowledge that some of the risks we perceive are real and need to be managed, but some are unreal. If we can differentiate and control the latter we are much better equipped to both understand the world and to change it. 

To say that political narratives are based on some truth should not be taken as reason to believe in them. Rather, we benefit far more – politically and intellectually – by examining them through the lens of narratology. If we recognise these as the stories they are we can start to break them down and think about them with a more practical eye and thus assess whether these narratives serve to empower us, or reduce us to our most harmful of beliefs – that doing nothing ‘causes no harm’. This is reflected in the language of Mill’s statement too; he frames this imperative in the language of un-reality – the ‘delusion’. In using this word Mills does two important things; it introduces the idea of narratives and is a call to action. Mills reminds us that our beliefs are at risk of becoming misaligned with our needs/intentions, that we are capable of justifying almost any behaviour to ourselves if it appears to ‘pacify’ our impulse towards self-preservation. 

Centers of power deliberately utilise narrative control to increase their power. They continually highlight personal risk and uncertainty; they reassure, disguise and slowly increase restrictions to freedom while at the same time emphasising the need for conformity and the powerlessness of opposition. Take this statement from Hermann Göring, who said ‘voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders’. When we read this with the idea of controlled narratives in our mind we realise that Göring’s words are not a statement – they are a promise. Words no longer reflect reality, they create it. While these narratives of disempowerment often come directly from centers of power, we should take care not to abdicate all personal responsibility. Researchers March and Olsen argue that there exists a ‘logic of appropriateness’ that results in individuals making decisions based on the question, “What is a person like me supposed to do in a situation like this”? This attitude has the effect of reinforcing conformity, limiting political energy and often creating a sense of powerlessness, particularly when this is reinforced by social convention. One way we answer this question is to compare our behaviour to those around us. The problem then becomes one where we wait for other people to act first, locking us into a state of passive observation that is fundamentally incapable of resisting harm. Thus, our most reasonable and logical seeming impulses can quickly spiral to become reasons to never take part. Joachim Prinz, a rabbi during Hitler’s regime, put it clearly when he said the ‘most important thing that I learned under those most tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.’

The final reason it is important to be aware of narratives of disempowerment is because of their totality. That is to say, a person who lives only by narratives supplied by others, for others, will surely soon lose the ability to read for themselves. This is contained in Mill’s fear of the ‘pacified’ man and he rightly separates the act of being pacified and experiencing peace. A sense of the juvenile, of the naive, is communicated in this word, that believing that one can get away with taking ‘no part, and form[ing] no opinion’ is both morally and practically inert. This is important because it also reinforces this idea of getting ‘lost’ in the false narrative and in so doing becoming someone who is totally disconnected from reality, who has become physically unable to see the truth, even when it is in front of them. Thus, the process of linguistic and narrative disempowerment, when repeated becomes the truth. Perhaps the most exemplary example of this is Orwell’s ‘1984’, where an explicit connection is drawn between power and language. Big Brother’s use of Doublethink and statements like ‘War is Peace’ are propaganda – clearly and obviously contradictory. But this is not an accident. The state in this book is all-controlling, and the statement is far more dangerous than just being logically contradictory. Through the repeated use of these oxymorons Orwell is showing how power structures can shatter the connection between language and truth. The subtle ‘wrongness’ of language is present throughout the novel and is a reminder to the reader to be aware that the associations we take for granted – like a word and its meaning – are only as real as we believe them to be. Moreover, Orwell shows that linguistic-turned-political control, when taken to its logical extreme doesn’t just result in a loss of power, it results in total deference to another’s narrative. This is effectively summarised in Wilson’s torture. Initially, the state seeks to control his understanding of language and truth; to accept ‘2+2=5’. But this is not the end – the goal is not to make Wilson believe in a specific falsehood, but to annihilate his ability to even identify what is real. As is said in the novel; ‘not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by Oceania’s philosophy’. This is echoed by Alinsky’s comment that if ‘people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them’. We can therefore see how a loss of narrative power can create a void of misunderstanding and our lack of linguistic agency turns everything into a political Cthulhu; indescribable and unbeatable, so disconnected from our political reality that there would be no point in even trying to engage with it. 

Therefore, the myth that Mills reminds us of, that inaction does ‘no harm’, is important not just because it encourages our political activation, but also because it reminds us we are capable of taking back the narrative. At the heart of rebellion and resistance is the realisation that there is no singular or fixed narrative. Perfectly captured in the words of T E Lawrence, ‘Nothing is written’.