Cellphone Culture Breeds Passive Injustice

When a person is attacked by another, many in the current generation raise their phones instead of stepping into help, calling for help, or beseeching others to help. Many thousands of YouTube videos are testaments to this behavior.

This does not just occur in dangerous situations. Sometimes a person is simply about to make a fool of themselves, but instead of stepping into the save this person from the embarrassing calamity—and thereby creating a friend for life—people watch and record the mishap.

This is a learned response. It is a response rewarded in clicks. It is so pervasive that if you look at any Good Samaritan account closely—such as someone saving another who has fallen onto a train track—you can see others in the background gleefully recording the event.

This is passive injustice—and it is very unmanly.

            After the Golden Rule, Cicero explains that being a just man is not always doing what is obviously right, because though active injustice—theft, murder, adultery—is clearly wrong, we often rationalize our way into passive injustice; for example, Cicero cautions that it’s no less wrong to stand by and allow someone else to be robbed than it is to rob someone, because if a man does nothing to stop an injustice he could have prevented, then he is a hypocrite. These rules are absolutes, says Cicero, as justice is never relative; after all, even those who have wronged us require justice—everyone deserves a fair trial. So to expunge passive injustice from our actions, Cicero men must constantly evaluate their own thinking and motivations to find the passive injustices hiding within what he thinks is right, but that are actually only decisions rationalized to benefit self-interest.

           In his bookThe SecondWorld War, Winston Churchill took up this point and argued that passive injustice led to what he called the “unnecessary war.” Churchill thought World War II wouldn’t have occurred if it weren’t for the excessive, dishonorable reparations that occurred after World War I. Then, Churchill argued, Germany was allowed to regain its power in a series of passive injustices, such as when Britain allowed Adolph Hitler to move into the Rhineland. Churchill thought the British government lacked a sense of true justice because it decided it was in its best interest to do passive injustices, such as allowing countries like Czechoslovakia to be sacrificed, because these passive injustices only emboldened Hitler to continue and gave him time to strengthen for the coming world war.