apathy

Apathy

by Bob on February 23, 2008

It has been written by some very wise people that apathy kills. And it's worse than wither love or hate. Someone just doesn't care. And more importantly, someone might not care about another person, and the person doesn't even exist anymore in their minds and hearts. Apathy means you're off someone's radar screen completely.

They used to say something like that in the music business. "We don't care if they love you or hate you, as long as they pay attention to you". That's show biz, sort of.

And it's true for advertisements on TV, on radio, in print media, and the like. If you notice it and give it a few albeit brief momemts, the advert was a success of sorts. But if you didn't give it any notice or attention, it failed.

Such is the fate of apathy or indifference.

It's hard to imagine if real apathy exists, given the way our memory would seems to work. Perhaps it does, but it is on the edge of being an active kind of process, rather than totally passive, or an emotional and cognitive zero quantity.

But perhaps real apathy exists. So it can be measured as nothingness.

Still, it's hard to imagine that no contribution is made in consciousness to an apathetic feeling or posture or response.

Apathy, not about others, can be about life or the world. Now, this can be very tricky. It can result in depression, detachment in a bad sense, and maybe even anhedonia. So, apathy can perhaps kill in this way too, self-directed.

In the 1970 book "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", Richard Bach wrote that "fear, boredom, and anger kill". This is a profoundly interesting statement. He didn't mention apathy, per se, but did mention boredom. They might be closely correlated. Not exact, but close, perhaps even cause and effect.

Again I wonder, is it humanly possible to be 100% apathetic or indifferent about someone. There has to be some conscious volition and will in the decision when it come and goes. Perhaps if someone is not in our sight or senses, it's easier to forget about them. But forgetting is not the same as apathy in the full case. So it's still an open question.

Regardless, apathy is oddly enough the strongest of emotional statements, maybe just a little above love and hate in intensity, and in being so is very paradoxical since we expect it to have no strength at all. Just passivity. But it would seem to take energy even to be passive.

Love and hate would seem to have huge emotional energy attached to them, and in fact they do, but the neutral place of apathy just isn't inertia as Isaac Newton might have defined it in Physics and his laws of Motion.

Still, it's an open question. The most we can really say for sure is that love and hate are two sides of the same coin and both take as much energy to feel. They're really the same emotive force with a twist to it. So in a very real sense, if we hate someone, we might as well love them instead ! But masks are many in our theatre of life, so we allow it to happen anyway.

Emotion is emotion. Apathy is supposed to be lack of emotion. But one wonders.

It's the worst kind of insult to not care at all about someone else. It is devastating.

If we read and follow the interesting work of Dr. R. D. Laing, name "Knots", we see that things are not so simple as on a soccer scorecard or scoreboard. In fact, words tell us all kinds of inadequate complications about our feelings and emotions. The word "not" is a real betrayal sometimes. Suppose someone says "I really don't want to upset you BUT ..." and then goes on, with that opening cushioning, to actually say the hurting thing. Human interaction is so very complicated it would seem.

So we progress to someone saying "I am not thinking about him" and we, following Dr. Laing's lead, wonder if that's possible given the literal statement in English.

All this aside, if people didn't care about the world, or things, or other people, we'd all be in real trouble as a civilisation.

But perhaps the iPOD and isolating devices like TV, and order-in Chinese food, is tipping the balance. And perhaps we can really insulate ourselves to the point where we are numb to others and things and just see ourselves in a neo-Solipsism philosophy. We arrive at Rene Descartes and his "Mediations" without the "deus ex machina". And we have a hard time in the final case that we ourselves even exist. Except if we go with Descartes and say "I think therefore I am".

Still, the new work in virtual reality makes it even less necessary to have human contact.

And it might be possible that modern narcissism can cause us to be numb and apathetic, and maybe suffer the same fate that Narcissus did in Ancient Greek myth: he fell in love with his own reflection on the water and fell in and drowned. Despite the fact that Echo loved him dearly. And Hera had taken Echo's voice away and she could only repeat what others said. Both Narcissus and Echo lost in the deal. We can say that Narcissus was apathetic to Echo due to his own self-love and distraction. Perhaps even truly apathetic.

So it would seem that self-love is the only causation of true apathy whereas other incidents of professed apathy require energy to ignore. In the latter case, it means that we have really not forgotten about the person or thing and we must overcome our feelings to be indifferent.

This may all sound like Sophistry as the accused Socrates of. But once we try to gain insight and figure things out, we quickly realise what a terribly hard task we have in front of us on the field of human emotions.

Admittedly, most Science and Applied Sciences do use a parlour trick to get around this: tables and formulas which are labeled as eternal truths. Until they're proven wrong decades or centuries later. Then everyone simply says "oops" as the magician has to say when the rabbit in not in the hat when he is supposed to come out at the tap of the wand.

The ancients said that man is half rational and half irrational, with the irrational presiding. So apathy would seem to be a torturous road to travel upon. Unless we unplug totally like in an isolation tank. And we know what happened in the 1980 movie "Altered States" to William Hurt's character who went into isolation chambers: bad news.

Nevertheless, we wrap up with brilliant quote from the writer Stephen Crane, who said:

"Philosophy should always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery."

Sage advice to anyone.