The Banality of Good: Why Evil Requires Exhaustion and Empathy Necessitates Inconvenience
It is not surprising that the past six years have bred absurdist detachment from the general population. Fascism continues to spread across the world in localized pockets of nationalist fervor. Late stage capitalism careens across an ever widening chasm of wealth inequality between both the poor and the rich and somehow even the rich and the billionaire class. And as civil rights become eroded and broken down into dust while the few lucky enough to find employment become drained by the constant grindstone of the capitalist mode of production, it all seems insignificant in the scope of anthropogenic climate change that has already begun its death spiral of cataclysms, tempests, and calamities that mark every season.
Is it any wonder why so many choose to ignore this and simply take in reality as a hot tub we cannot escape and only enjoy the incremental increases in temperature for as long as it does not harm “us”? It seems as though the only actions we have at our disposal are to vote when we are called to, donate to a handful of charities in December, and wait for the problems to go away in large, sweeping motions that will never be contested. These actions are few and can be found within a philosophy of selfish resignation, where we will be ok and do not owe anyone anything.
This philosophy is fucking nonsense. The problem is that it is far easier and nowhere near a burden to carry as any philosophy that requires action. In fact, almost all of them will be infinitely more difficult, exhausting, and seemingly impossible than selfish resignation. And I want to know why.
I have been trying to write an essay on empathy for a while now, ever since I saw a Conservative use the insane phrase “the Sin of Empathy” in reference to Bishop Mariann Budde’s call to President Trump to show mercy.
I think it is telling that we have reached a final apotheosis of selfishness in action. Rampant individualism that has proliferated within capitalism has transformed into what I can only describe as evil. Evil in the sense of Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil,” evil in the sense of G.M. Gilbert’s “an absence of Empathy.” We live in a world where we are not asked to participate in evil, but rather we are limited, exhausted, and incentivised to allow it to spread by doing nothing. In order for us to help one another, we need to accept the inconvenience of the act of helping.
I want to be very clear when I reiterate a common thought that evil succeeds through inaction. I do not mean that you spread evil through rest. Resting your body, your mind, and your soul is a human need that at the most primeval level is how your body is able to continue to function as a human being. In fact, forcing your body to not rest so you can be more “productive” is in its own way, its own form of inaction. By inaction, I mean inaction against evil. If you break your leg, you will only harm your leg by continuing to move, and by resting you allow yourself to heal. “Inaction” is better understood as a refusal to adapt or change, no matter how small of an inconvenience it may be.
I must also be clear by action, I do mean any small action, which in its relative insignificance can be absurd in comparison to the issues we struggle with. Two cases in point for myself are Spotify and Wix. Two companies I have made inconvenient but simple changes to detach myself from in order to stop being complicit in their actions.
I: What Evil Never Asks of You
Wix was the previous website designer and host for the blog. However, as the website strongly pivoted towards generative AI and LLMs for website designers to use, it became clear that my work, writing, and ideas were now within the data that Wix could use for its machine learning algorithms. Furthermore, the company has a history of outright support for the government of Israel and its genocidal policies, encouraging workers in its Dublin office to “join a company initiative to create videos and creative campaigns” to “support Israel’s narrative” with explicit advice to “show Westernity” as “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans and Americans.” This extended to outright calls to avoid any focus on statistics relating to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as “the number of deaths and bombings in Gaza will be significantly higher [than Israeli casualities].”
I made no income on the ad revenue generated by my blog, but Wix did. And I could not allow that. So, I switched to Blogger, which unfortunately has its own issues with Google promoting Gemini across most of its platforms outside of Blogger. However, inconvenient as it was to change, I believe it was worth it to try and minimize and reduce the harm that inaction would cause. It took a few days of setting up the website, going through the blog, and painstakingly recreating as much of the style of the old blog as possible in a site builder that is nowhere near as convenient as Wix is. Throughout the process, a thought kept running through my head: “who will notice? Who will criticize you for still using Wix? You aren’t actively using the AI or paying Wix money, so what harm are you causing? Why bother?” Keep those doubts in mind for now.
Another, more painstaking change I’ve had to make is with Spotify. For the past two months, I have been using the free version of Youtube’s music app after cancelling my Spotify subscription. All of this stemmed from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek investing €600 million into, and I am not joking by any means, a military contractor specializing in AI and drones called Helsing. Spotify has been criticized for years for its artist reimbursement policies, its own use of AI in their DJ, and this investment in the military industrial complex responsible for the incalculable death tolls in the genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Ukraine, and the bloated, over-funded police states of the world is the final straw.
The only thing stopping me from withdrawing my subscription is the inconvenience of not having music whenever I want, however I want, without ads. And for a lot of people, that is too much to ask. And to a degree, I can understand why it feels this way—because I went through the process of cancelling my subscription and slowly, painstakingly, rebuilding a small corner of my amassed library on Youtube by hand. I’m nowhere close to complete, and many songs that were available on Spotify are not on Youtube. I still refuse to return to Spotify.
As with Wix, the entire process of changing how I listen to music was met with internal doubts of a familiar shape: “who will notice? Who will criticize you for still using Spotify? You probably wouldn’t even criticize those for using Spotify, so what harm are you causing by using it all the same? Why bother?”
This is what evil asks of you, or rather what it never asks of you. Sure, it may seem like the “evil” in society is tempting you to actively choose to cause harm. How many far right politicians beg for your vote in order to “cleanse” the nation of diversity, justice, equity, and inclusion? This is a small percentage of the problem. Evil, true evil, is not a person, or even one idea. It is a benign and total surrender of empathy to selfish impulses that does not require everyone to join it, but to allow it to trespass. Why bother making small but inconvenient changes when you could surrender to ignorance, apathy, and enjoyment of small pleasures that come at the expense of total isolation from the plight of your fellow kin? After all, there are close to 8 Billion people in the world, surely someone else will help?
Those of you familiar with First Aid training, anti-harassment campaigns, or any form of emergency response will understand this as the “Bystander Effect.” The idea is that anyone who comes across an emergency or call for help will ignore it and rationalize it as it being outside their responsibility. “I might do more harm.” “Someone else will help.” “Nothing I do will stop this.” The Bystander Effect is at least rationalized through empathy, even if it is wrong.
Not all rationalization is based in empathy however. Nowhere in the world have I seen this more clearly than the weaponisation of “therapy-speak,” whereby the language and tools of mental health and recovery have been taken by those that never needed them to absolve themselves of any responsibility.
Do you need to be open to your friends about the hardships you’ve dealt with in the past year? “Don’t do that, you’re literally trauma dumping on me.”
Are you telling a friend that you see what happened slightly differently from how they see it. “You’re gaslighting me and you need to stop.”
Do you think you have a responsibility to help a friend who needs someone to help drive them somewhere, someone to help move some furniture, or even just someone to talk to.
“I don’t owe anyone anything.”
You do.
We all do.
II: What Can You Actually Do?
I once again must be absolutely clear: I am not addressing those who actually do help but take time to rest. I am addressing those who have done nothing and shirk any inkling of responsibility they have to society. If you have been outspoken, if you have seen the horrors of the world, if you have given time, energy, and resources to try and alleviate the pain of the world and you must rest before you exhaust yourself: you must rest or else you die. However, it is very possible to become apathetic and allow yourself to shrug off what you owe to people.
You go through life and hardship, thinking to yourself, “as soon as I can, I will help, I will do more,” and as you burn out, you know you cannot be the person you wish to see help. And then it begins. The world has exhausted you and left you in a position where any action taken to help the world is not only an inconvenience, it is harmful to you. It could be for any reason, mental, physical, or more often than not, financial. You do not have the time, energy, or finances to help. So you do what little you can or nothing at all because you cannot. But then it changes. You are able to rest. You secure yourself enough—whether it is time, rest, or money does not matter: it is enough—to alleviate your own hardship. But when it comes to help, you still do not because you have learned that you do not have enough to help. If you have been at this low point, how would you know it’s over? It is the inverse of the boiling frog dilemma. Alleviation of your hardship at such a small pace can make it feel as if it will never end. And now even if you do have enough, you are reluctant to share because you are now resigned.
I need to break it to you: you need to learn to recognize when you are capable of helping again. You need to learn to stop looking for the helpers and start being one. It is not enough to know better, you must act better when you can.
In this world, it will always be harder to do good than to not do good, because only one actually requires work. It will always be infinitely harder to do good than to do evil because to do evil is to do nothing at all.
This means helping those who seem “undeserving” of any help. Extend empathy and support to those we in society see as “undesirable” or you believe are undeserving because of their beliefs. I may despise fascists and the conservatives who underpin their movement: but I will never call for anyone to refuse aid to provinces and states suffering from natural disasters because they “voted wrong.” (which is itself a fallacy that assumes everyone in a given area supports the dominant political party there. Not all Texans are for Trump; not all Albertans are for Pollievre).
This means listening to the cries of people being slaughtered. Right now, on Tiktok, dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands of Gazans are begging for a moment of time. These videos are made and produced with what little remains of Gaza’s digital infrastructure. They cry out for you to do one thing: “please don’t scroll.” They ask you to search for various trending items like gold watches, Dubai chocolate, etcetera, to help the video get more attention. Comments are filled with seemingly off-topic remarks on the latest trends, gossip, and products, all to help engagement and help these people get the fundraising necessary to help either secure supplies to alleviate famine or to help evacuate and escape the genocide. And that’s in addition to the hundreds of videos by activists who support Gofundme’s and other fundraising efforts on behalf of these victims of Genocide. It’s telling that despite the support received, the percentage of views compared to other interactions make it clear that most scroll and look away.
I think all of us can be different. We can choose to not look away. We can do something, anything, no matter how small, because that is better than nothing.
Conclusions:
In the words of the fictional "Burned Man" Joshua Graham from New Vegas: Honest Hearts, "There is much to be skeptical of in this world, so it no longer surprises me to learn how many people don’t really believe in anything." It does surprise me how many of these people act as though they do. Self-professed Christians who worship false idols, hoard wealth within their holy spaces, and refuse to follow any of Christ’s teachings. Self-professed Liberals who preach tolerance and acceptance but consider trans people a “political inconvenience” to be pushed aside, or the deaths of thousands across the world “irrelevant” to us here.
I am not asking you to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of charity, abstinence of pleasure, or otherwise break yourself to help as many as you can. I am asking you to try to be empathetic to those who are, truly, different from you.
I am asking you to refuse to be exhausted. Refuse to be broken by the onslaught of noise, pain, and suffering being inflicted upon you at all angles.
I am asking you to talk to your loved ones. Ask them how they are. Listen when they need to be heard. Help them stand when they cannot stand anymore.
I don’t receive any revenue from the ads on Blogger. But, I have linked the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund here if you believe you can help those who are most vulnerable to the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine.
I am asking you to try.
Sources:
Jordan Darville, “Spotify’s Daniel Ek Secures €600 Million Investment in A.I Military Drone Company,” The Fader, https://www.thefader.com/2025/06/20/spotify-daniel-ek-helsing-investment
Jack Power, “Internal Wix Chat Encouraged Staff to Support Israel’s Narrative in Hamas Conflict,” Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/10/24/internal-wix-chat-encouraged-staff-to-support-israels-narrative-in-hamas-conflict/
Eliza Griswold, “Why Bishop Mariann Budde Wanted to Speak to Donald Trump” The New Yorker,
Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, https://www.pcrf.net/
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