Why Silence Enables Injustice
There is so much happening in our country right now. It can be hard to make sense of what we’re seeing, or to even know where to place our attention.
In every society, especially in chaotic times, people fall into roles. There are the perpetrators, the bystanders, the upstanders, the protesters, and the rescuers.
But these roles are not permanent identities. In different circumstances, the very same person can move between them, depending on their courage, their convictions, and how much they fear losing if they refuse to remain silent.
There is a pattern that repeats itself throughout modern history. It’s a pattern we have seen again and again, even when we don’t want to recognize it. It starts with a small group of people who seek power by villainizing another group of people; people who are different from the majority in some visible or cultural way.
The people who do the villainizing are often referred to as perpetrators. Perpetrators don’t see themselves as villains. They see themselves as heroic. They are often ordinary people who convince themselves that harm is necessary, justified, deserved, or simply not their responsibility to question. They convince themselves that their actions are not only acceptable but heroically justified.
Sometimes they do it for power or political gain. Sometimes, they do it for a financial benefit. Sometimes they believe they are protecting something important: a way of life, religious beliefs, or moral traditions. They tell themselves stories that make their actions easier to live with.
History is full of examples of this; ordinary people who participated in systems that harmed or brutalized others because they were told it was acceptable, necessary, or for the greater good, and they allowed themselves to believe it.
And here’s something important to understand — perpetrators are typically a very small percentage of the population — often around three to five percent, but they are very vocal and make promises that, at first, seem very beneficial to the majority.
Perpetrators usually begin as people who are deeply disgruntled because their lives are not what they believe they should be. They feel held down, cheated, or overlooked. And rather than examining systems or circumstances, they find a group of people to blame.
They band together, they form a mission, and that mission becomes singular: defeat those they believe are responsible for their dissatisfaction.
As they grow louder, they build a base of followers. But most of the harm they cause is not driven by their increasing their numbers. It’s driven by something else entirely — the silence of the majority.
The group targeted by perpetrators becomes the persecuted. They absorb the anger and frustration of a society looking for someone to blame. And when the majority remains silent, perpetrators grow bolder. They grow more confident, more brazen, and more brutal.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators repeat the same messages, over and over again.
They tell people:
“This group is evil.”
“They are criminals.”
“They are murderers and rapists.”
“Because of them, you are not safe. Your children are not safe.”
They insist:
“This group is taking your jobs.”
“They are taking your money, your future.”
“You are struggling because of them.”
“If they were gone, your life would finally be better.”
At this stage, the perpetrators themselves still represent a very small portion of the population, often less than five percent.
In truth, large-scale cruelty is rarely powered by millions of villains.
It is driven by a few and enabled by the silence of many.
This majority, on the other hand, are often called the bystanders. They see what is happening. Many of them disagree with it, sometimes vehemently. But they remain largely silent, usually for one of three reasons: fear, personal benefit, or uncertainty.
Typically, sixty to seventy percent of people remain bystanders. They have thoughts. They have opinions, but they keep them private or confined to safe conversations with friends. They don’t participate in cruelty, but they don’t intervene either.
Sometimes they remain silent because they are afraid. Sometimes it’s because they do not want to lose social standing. Sometimes it’s because they are overwhelmed. And often, it’s because they assume someone else will step in.
Bystanding feels safer than action. It preserves comfort. It protects reputations. It avoids conflicts. But silence has it’s price. And history shows us that widespread silence is often what allows brutality to grow.
Then there are the upstanders. They usually make up about ten to twenty percent. These are the people who do speak out — to friends, colleagues, neighbors, and yes, sometimes publicly.
They do not always stand on stages or hold signs. Sometimes they simply refuse to participate in something they believe is wrong. Sometimes they ask hard questions in quiet rooms. Sometimes they speak up when something feels wrong, even when it draws negative attention to them.
Upstanding is often small, personal, and costly. It may mean challenging a policy at work. It may mean correcting misinformation in a conversation.
It may mean refusing to laugh at a cruel joke. Upstanders disrupt the ease of wrongdoing. They make silence harder to maintain.
A smaller group — often about five to ten percent — become active protestors.
They organize. They gather. They march. They write. They demand change. They attend vigils, demonstrations, and public actions.
Some are injured. Some are targeted. Some lose their jobs, their status, or their sense of safety and security. Protesters step into public view. And they often pay a huge for doing so. Their actions are visible, and visibility carries risk.
Protesters are often dismissed as dramatic, extreme, or disruptive, especially by the persecutors. Yet protest has been a catalyst for nearly every major expansion of rights and protections in modern history.
Protest is rarely comfortable. It requires time, energy, and a willingness to endure criticism. But protest moves issues from private discomfort into public visibility.
And finally, there is the smallest group of all — often less than three percent. These are the rescuers. Rescuers go further. They intervene directly. They shield. They protect. They sometimes place themselves in personal danger to defend someone else. Rescuers rarely know they are rescuers at the time. They simply recognize that silence has a cost they are unwilling to pay.
Rescuers are often remembered by history because their actions are unmistakable. They do not simply object. They act.
Rescuers like Irena Sendler, Viola Liuzzo, Judith Heumann and Nelson Mandela did not act because it was safe, or popular, or rewarded. They didn’t do it to be heroes. They were ordinary people who made a decision in a moment when inaction would have been easier. They acted because doing nothing was not an option they could live with.
Rescuers actively help people who are being persecuted. They take enormous risks — risks that could cost them their livelihoods, their freedom, and sometimes their lives. And often, those risks extend to their families as well.
We like to imagine that we would all be rescuers – that we would all live our beliefs in heroic ways — but history tells us something much harder to face. Very few people are willing to risk everything. Most of us turn away.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The unsettling reality is this. Most of us have been in more than one category at different points in our lives.
We may have been a bystander in one situation and an upstander in another. We may have protested one injustice and ignored another. We may have benefited from systems we privately questioned. Character is not tested in calm seasons. It is tested when something costs us.
When speaking up risks our reputation, when refusing participation risks our income, when intervening risks our safety, or when dissent risks our belonging, that is when our character is truly tested.
In chaotic times, the pressure to stay silent increases. The fear of losing status, relationships, or security becomes real. That is when categories shift. That is when we decide who we are willing to be.
What Do We Stand to Lose
One of the most powerful forces shaping behavior is not cruelty. It is fear.
It is the fear of losing a job, fear of social isolation, fear of being labeled as difficult, the fear of legal consequences, or the fear of standing alone, that leads most people to be bystanders.
The question is not whether people know right from wrong. The question is what they are willing to risk to act on what they know.
And that calculation is different for everyone. Some people have more to lose. Some people are already vulnerable. Some people are protected by privilege. Those realities matter but they do not erase responsibility.
Our Country Today
What we are seeing now, in our country, follows this same historical pattern. But there is one difference that matters. We have something that people in the past did not; we have immediate access to information.
In earlier eras, perpetrators could travel from place to place, making promises to one group and then offering completely different promises somewhere else. They could break the law with impunity, confident that there would be no real consequences. By the time information was gathered, printed, and distributed, events had already unfolded.
News rarely traveled far or fast, and often, it came from a single source. When that source was biased, or controlled by the perpetrators themselves, the full truth was never told.
Today, that is no longer the case. We often see video of events within minutes of them happening. We can see the same moment from multiple angles. We can uncover blatant lies. Even the most skeptical among us can watch and decide for themselves what actually occurred.
This doesn’t mean we should believe everything we see online. We still have to question, verify, and slow down our reactions.
But it does mean this: when what we are being told directly contradicts what we can see with our own eyes, we have a responsibility to pause and to believe what is real, not rhetoric we are being told or propaganda that directly contradicts the reality we see and hear. We have the choice to make our own determinations.
That choice matters because the simple act of refusing to look away can move someone from being a bystander to being an upstander. And upstanders, quietly, steadily, and often without recognition, can change the course of history.
The question is whether we are willing to see what is happening, or if we can live with the cost of looking away.
History’s Memory
When we look back at difficult periods in history, we rarely ask what people believed privately. We look at what they did.
We remember the architects of brutality. We remember, but can’t quite understand, the quiet majority who did nothing. We remember the voices that that did speak out. We remember the ones who resisted. And we remember the ones who sheltered and protected those being unjustly harmed.
History does not record what people intended. It records the actions they took, the lives they saved, and the justice they restored.
Our Choice
The categories are always present. The scapegoated groups of people will always exist. Perpetrators will exist. Bystanders, Upstanders, Protesters, and Rescuers will exist. The only real question is who we become when staying quiet would be easier.
Silence always gives more power to the perpetrators and increases brutality towards the persecuted. And in the end, what will matter is not what we thought or believed in private, but what we said aloud in public, what we demanded, and yes, what we did.
Every action carries a cost. Even silence. Even looking away. The only question is who will pay it.
Still Within Our Grasp: The Promise of a Nation – Jan Mariet’s A Day in the Life
“Life Unworthy of Living” Response – Jan Mariet’s A Day in the Life
