Bystander syndrome

Bystander syndrome. David Warren writes about it:

The term describes our modern, non-participatory democracy quite well. Everyone is equal, & everyone has rights. We might call them “the rights of the bystander.” One might say that the most fundamental of these rights, on which all others can now be constructed, is the right to assume that “someone else is taking care of it.”

Do people have no conscience? Warren writes,

It is a myth that people have no conscience. Our Maker implanted that in each of us. We all know that voice perfectly well, even those who deny it. It is the voice to which we reply: “There was nothing I could do.”

This has been the basic “liberal” act, through all ages: as much among the Pharisees as among our modern adepts of “secular humanism.” It is to refute the True, with the Plausible. It is to answer the hard moral argument with the soft tendentious argument; with mild heckling; with pseudo-moral posturing; with a display of insolence if it comes to that; & finally, with “statistics.” It is to be glib, by reflex, persisting into habit. And yet all these responses are founded in an uncompromising & absolutely necessary act of faith: that there is no God who will come in Judgement.

Czeslaw Milosz called this “the true opium of the people.” He defined it as, “a belief in nothingness after death; the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Read about some incidents where people were bystanders: http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/2013/02/23/bystander-syndrome/