Willful ignorance is a danger to our society, a disease that poisons groups and individuals all across the world. Ignorance itself is already damaging due to not understanding or knowing something, but willful ignorance is the intentional avoidance of truth. It is what causes us to turn away from the uncomfortable, controversial or painful topics at hand, even when we know that it is wrong. In our modern day, especially with politics and social media, it is easy to point at others for being “ignorant,” yet we are often also to blame. We skip over the hard news stories. We pass by the homeless person on the street, armed with preconceived notions about why they are there. We tell ourselves that our small actions will not make a difference, or that someone else will step in.
And yet, I also recognize that the opposite can happen. Sometimes, our attempts to help are misused or misunderstood. Sometimes ,giving money or support does not lead to the outcome we hope for. However, that should not lead us to retreat into indifference. The primary issue is preconceived notions that may influence us to stick to one story, staying willfully ignorant and not seeking to further our understanding of the dynamic situations we find ourselves in.
The truth is that we all turn a blind eye to evil and wrongdoing in one way or another. We prefer comfort to confrontation, and we make excuses rather than take accountability and responsibility. We protect ourselves by remaining ignorant so that we do not have a guilty conscience. Even to the degree that once truth is revealed, it now demands action, and action demands sacrifice.
Willful ignorance does not just make us uninformed about the world. It makes us complicit to evil. Every time we look away, every time we stay silent, which allows injustice to continue, we are all guilty. Every time we choose ourselves over another is a betrayal of our humanity and Christian nature.
At its core, willful ignorance is caused by fear. The fear of being wrong, of not doing enough, of being responsible, of sacrifice. To see the truth and injustices of the world clearly means to change how we are living and to admit we are hypocrites. It is easier to remain ignorant and blind than to face the reality that our comfort depends on another person’s suffering. We often imagine evil as something distant or disconnected. An immediate thought is the holocaust, tyrants, dictatorships and regimes. But evil exists because ordinary people refuse to step up and see it. How many people allow evil to propagate because they do not want confrontation, and how much pain has that caused? We blame the German people for not stepping up to injustice, yet we are just like them.
Consider how often this happens in the world around us. We ignore human trafficking because it is disturbing to think about. We hear about sweatshops, slavery and abuse, but we keep buying the same brands. We learn about global poverty and hunger and then tell ourselves the issue is impossible to fix. Every single moment like these chips away at our moral integrity. The world’s greatest injustices rarely continue because of active cruelty, but rather because we all remain passive and complacent.
Ignorance not only harms our neighbor, but it also harms our souls. Truth is the person of Christ, who calls us to live honestly and love others. To reject the truth is to reject his command. When we ignore suffering, we ignore the image of God in all of those who suffer.
We all must pursue the response to take action instead of comfort. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.” Silence and passivity in the face of evil and injustice are still actions and agreements with it. I understand that I continue repeating myself, but in this society, in this human condition, we all hear, but we do not listen. We all see, but do not understand. We continue to inebriate ourselves with the aid of our comfortable community, doom scrolling and the justification that we cannot make a difference. We become drunkards of the nihilistic thought, self-medicated by our standards of life, by our personal problems and personal goals.
The greatest evil is not found in those who commit it, but in those who see it and choose silence.
