Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

There has always been a silence that evil loves — the hush of polite society. Empires have risen on it, revolutions have fed on it, and civilizations have died from it. Long before anyone called it “mass formation” or “cognitive dissonance,” the Greeks called it akrasia — the paralysis of the good. “The hottest places in hell,” wrote Dante centuries later, “are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” (Goodreads). And yet neutrality has become America’s most common creed.

We live in a time when virtue whispers and vice owns the microphone. It wasn’t always this way. The ancients taught that courage was not simply one virtue among others but the very condition of all virtue. Aristotle called it “the first virtue, because it makes all the others possible” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Without courage, love becomes sentimentality and justice becomes rhetoric. Courage is the muscle memory of the soul. But it atrophies in prosperity, and America has been prosperous for too long.

It is a strange feature of history that evil organizes itself quickly while good deliberates. The worst men have always found one another first. From Rome’s Praetorian guards to the commissars of the Soviet bloc, corruption has a way of uniting before conscience can even call a meeting. The philosopher John Stuart Mill observed that “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing” (Open Culture). Today, the looking-on has become a lifestyle — mediated, anesthetized, and scrolled past in real time.

What happens when a republic built on freedom becomes terrified of it? Thomas Jefferson warned that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground” (National Archives), and that progress has accelerated with digital precision. Censorship now wears the face of compassion. “Content moderation” replaces open discourse, while bureaucrats police language in the name of kindness. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this the new frontier of “private governance” over speech (EFF). It is still censorship — only the priests have changed their robes.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt called it “the banality of evil” — the quiet obedience of men who follow procedure instead of conscience (Wikipedia). Bureaucratic evil never roars; it hums. It multiplies forms, issues guidance, and convenes panels. It doesn’t need the spectacle of cruelty when it can enforce morality through metrics. We live in a nation now ruled by metrics — of virtue, of safety, of compliance — and the most obedient are always the most celebrated.

America’s new theology is safety. During the pandemic, fear became a civic duty. “Mass formation psychosis,” a phrase debated but recognizable, described how entire populations were hypnotized by shared dread and sanctioned outrage (Psychology Today). Churches closed their doors while liquor stores stayed open. The faithful retreated, the bureaucrats advanced, and the vocabulary of faith was replaced with the vocabulary of risk. Even now, we police one another’s speech with the same moral fervor once reserved for heresy. Fear has learned to speak the language of virtue.

The erasure of history completes the spell. Statues topple, books disappear, and the past is rewritten by those who find truth inconvenient. George Orwell saw it clearly: “He who controls the past controls the future.” (Internet Archive). A people without memory cannot rebel; they can only repeat. We erase our sins and, in doing so, erase our antibodies.

In quieter times, we studied history to inoculate ourselves against it. Now, students learn grievance but not gratitude, slogans but not chronology. They can name their pronouns but not their presidents. The civic immune system fails when it no longer recognizes its own infections. What the philosopher C.S. Lewis called “men without chests” (Goodreads) — those raised to feel but not to act — are precisely the citizens modern tyranny requires. They are kind, tolerant, and harmless — and they will stand by as the walls close in.

And yet, beneath the noise, something restless stirs. Perhaps it is the residue of the frontier spirit, or the moral muscle memory of generations that once bled for liberty. Every tyranny underestimates its own decay. The Soviet Union imploded not from invasion but from exhaustion (BBC History). The Berlin Wall fell when enough people stopped pretending it couldn’t (History.com). The same might still be true of America: the wall is digital now, but the courage required to breach it is the same ancient kind.

What the nation needs is not another election cycle or manifesto but moral stamina. Courage that looks like decency. Faith that looks like endurance. The philosopher Leo Tolstoy wrote that “wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it” (Goodreads), and that is the only antidote to mass compliance. In every age, those who refuse to go along are branded extremists until history catches up and calls them heroes.

So much of our national illness is spiritual — a fatigue of the soul disguised as politics. The cure will not come from Washington or Silicon Valley or any savior in a suit. It will come, as it always has, from individual conscience — the one form of governance tyrants cannot scale. As Bonhoeffer said before his execution, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” (Goodreads). The sleep of the good is evil’s only oxygen. It’s time, at last, to wake.

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Maureen Steele

Maureen Steele is co-founder of the American Made Foundation is an organization that connects influential leaders and grassroots movements to drive real change.

Latest posts by Maureen Steele (see all)

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