On Political Apathy
by Teodora Georgescu · 3 min read
It’s easy to make an enemy out of a person who is politically apathetic, and it is easy to cast judgment on their abilities to be “educated” or opinionated in the “right way”. Through this space of back-and-forth jurisdiction, regarding the status and treatment of those politically apathetic, we have come to forget how background structures and entrenched frameworks have had an overshadowing effect on shaping political culture. Before judgement, we must come to the table with an understanding of how these conditions shape how, and if even, people are able to engage politically.
It’s maddening to see the world around you consistently fall prey to patterns you feel deep in your heart can be unwound. Most people initially aim to solve politics using empathy and humanity and are shocked to find that there exists a certain type of indifference out there, and a neutrality that can feel baffling and infuriating. Sometimes, this indifference exists in your very own family. Sometimes it scrolls past you on social media and reminds you that disengagement can truly be a lifestyle. This indifference can haunt you and make you feel cheated.
To live a politicised life is to live with this frustration daily, to believe that empathy and morality should be at the centre of how we register the complex happenings of the international world, yet to be confronted again and again with its limitations. In a world where success feels reliant on proximity to power and connections rather than effort, our lives and our identities become politicised automatically. Social media feeds us a dense and confronting concoction of information and misinformation alike, forcing our choices to feel gigantic in the face of a future that is unknown, and shaping our political awareness through fear and overstimulation. Here, political apathy can feel like a crime because it appears unintuitive to the way in which you believe you must live your life; it can feel baffling to try to understand how one would even go about living a depoliticised life. And much of the existing commentary on political apathy reflects this strong belief that apolitical people are ignorant and lazy. casually positioning political apathy as being a sole by-product of moral failure.
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