Complacent Contentedness
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By Walter Washington, MPA, REALTOR®, ABR®, AHWD®, C2EX®
Reflecting on the reviews of others to determine worthy criticism of a matter that covers a generic and general overview of our existence can pose conflicting perspectives that constantly compete for your attention in an effort to prove a point that you may have already agreed or disagreed with from the onset of the attempt to sway your opinion to the preconceived presentation of cherry-picked facts ascertained from those reviews. Wandering about mentally, whether in favor of or against the presumptuous dissent offered as a veiled popular opinion when the opportunity for potentially countless countering opinions are readily available to illustrate otherwise, can be downright dangerous, especially when emotions, past experiences, egos, entitlement, and ever so much more can and oft times does play a factor throughout the passion that is being exhibited. To put it in Biblical terms, "Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions." (Proverbs 18:2, New International Version) While this does not mean that opinionated people or those with an opinion, rather, are fools, nor does it condone the negative ramifications conceived amongst evildoers onto their victims, it does mean that when we posit our personal views we have to be ready to receive and possibly accept the feedback that is given in agreement, disagreement, or neither. The encampment of those who perpetuate a neutral standpoint may bring further complications to the intentful discourse designed to debate which case presents the stronger argument because of the lack of a stance on the matter thus adding fuel to the fire rather than quenching the flames of argumentativeness spewing from the pit of dual haterism that remains as one of the constant factors as to why the dust never ideally settles and disdainfully blows over or carries over to the next group of minds as a rampant pandemic of dissettlement amongst those involved regardless of whether they actively or subconsciously recognize their participatory involvement.
Truth is ever so evolving from a foundation that was never truly static to begin with, growing and morphing into what any particular assembly of stakeholders with any particular constellation of motivations at any particular moment in the progressively and regressively alternating pendulum swing of social, political, economic, and spiritual consciousness decides it ought to mean, as it is applied, misapplied, weaponized, glorified, buried, resurrected, recontextualized, and ultimately redefined by those whose vested interests in its particular interpretation conveniently aligns with whatever argument they happen to find themselves defending in the very moment of its invocation, and yet, perhaps most perplexing of all and most resistant to resolution by any of the instruments of reason that our collective intellectual inheritance has thus far placed at our disposal, it is this very malleability of what passes for truth in our public and private discourse that allows the comfortably contented among us to remain precisely and purposefully undisturbed in their settled satisfaction, cocooned within the self-authored narrative that their contentedness is a form of wisdom rather than a form of surrender, without ever once being summoned before the bar of honest accountability for the passive complicity that their contentedness invariably represents when examined through the unsparing lens of the real-world consequences that their chosen inaction, their cultivated neutrality, or their strategically selective engagement perpetually and predictably produces for those who do not have the luxury, the privilege, or frankly the option of complacency.
Complacent contentedness, as a concept deserving far more sustained and far less charitable examination than the surface-level pleasantries with which it is typically, dismissively, and rather conveniently described by those who benefit most directly from its continued existence in the social fabric, is not simply the harmless posture of an individual who has found something resembling peace and is unwilling to disturb it on the reasonable grounds that the disturbance would cost them more than they are presently and perhaps permanently prepared to pay in the currency of discomfort, inconvenience, social friction, and the potential erosion of their carefully curated reputation as someone who gets along with everyone, offends no one, and therefore belongs to no particular camp in any particular conflict, but is rather a deeply embedded social mechanism, operating with the quiet efficiency of systems that benefit from not being named, by which entire communities, institutions, and successive generations consent by their collective silence and their satisfied collective absence from every arena that matters to the continuation of conditions that harm some members of the community while elevating others, all while maintaining for themselves the deniable comfort of having never once technically, formally, or on record chosen a side in a battle that was, is, and will continue to be fought whether they show up or not, because, and this must be stated with all of the directness and without any of the softening qualifications that the point's plainness neither needs nor invites, the act of choosing not to choose is itself a choice, and one that lands with the full and unambiguous weight of its consequences squarely, if quietly, on the side of those whose designs for the world are best served and most durably protected when the people who might otherwise resist, complicate, or dismantle those designs elect instead to remain comfortable.
It is a curious and deeply instructive truth, one that the studied discomfort of those most implicated in its implications has never quite succeeded in suppressing long enough to be forgotten by those most harmed by the phenomenon it describes, that the most persistent obstacle to progress in any endeavor of meaningful communal significance, whether that endeavor unfolds in the halls of governance where policy is made and unmade with consequences spanning generations, in the boardrooms of commerce where the distribution of resources is determined in ways that ripple outward far beyond the immediate transaction, in the sanctuaries of faith where the translation of professed conviction into lived practice is either undertaken or quietly abandoned, in the classrooms where the next generation is being shaped in ways that will outlast every person currently engaged in the heated debate about what those classrooms ought to look like and for whose benefit they ought most urgently to function, or in the neighborhoods where the compounding weight of accumulated historical decisions made by people long deceased continues to manifest with striking regularity in the present conditions of living people trying simply, stubbornly, and against considerable resistance to lead lives of dignity and expanding opportunity, is not typically the loudest and most visible opposition assembled against it, not the organized and at least honestly declared resistance whose convictions, however misguided or even contemptible their application, represent a form of engaged and committed investment in the outcome, but is rather the vast, unspoken, uncounted, and persistently and dangerously underestimated mass of the comfortably contented whose determination, operating through the simple and largely consequence-free inertia of a life arranged deliberately around the avoidance of friction and the preservation of existing arrangements, has decided that the outcome, whatever it may ultimately cost those most at risk from its failure, does not warrant the personal cost of their engagement, and who will, when the accounting arrives as it invariably does though rarely on a schedule convenient enough to confront each individual contributor to the result, find themselves in possession of an alibi constructed entirely and conveniently from the absence of a record, because they were never present to be recorded.
The philosophical tradition that stretches across the full and remarkably instructive arc of millennia of human reflection on the question of moral responsibility in the persistent and recurring face of injustice has produced no shortage of formulations that speak to this precise phenomenon with a clarity and a precision that the fashionable and frequently self-serving language of contemporary discourse has struggled to match and in numerous instances has actively, if not always consciously, obscured, from the Platonic warning that the price paid by good people who refuse to engage in the governance of their communities is the governance of those communities by people worse than themselves, to the Burkean caution that has outlived its original context to become one of the most frequently invoked and least frequently applied observations in the history of moral philosophy, to the theologically grounded and institutionally inconvenient conviction articulated in James 2:17 that a faith without works is, in the starkest and most unambiguous terms the text provides, dead, each of these formulations arriving at the same fundamental diagnosis of the same fundamental pathology by a different intellectual and spiritual route, which is the irreducible conclusion that the world as it is and as it tends relentlessly to become without sustained and personally costly deliberate intervention is not a world that rewards, accommodates, or even tolerates indefinitely the comfortable passivity of those who have persuaded themselves that their goodness is sufficiently and creditably demonstrated by the extensive and carefully catalogued inventory of things they have refrained from doing rather than by the far shorter and far more demanding inventory of things they have chosen, at genuine personal cost, inconvenience, and reputational risk, to actually and concretely do.
There are, when examined with the unsparing clarity that sufficient distance from our own self-flattering narratives occasionally and briefly and uncomfortably affords, two kinds of citizens in any organized society that has ever existed or is ever likely to exist, and the distinction between them is not drawn along the familiar and endlessly rehearsed lines of political affiliation, economic standing, educational attainment, geographic origin, racial identity, religious tradition, or any of the other sorting mechanisms that the tribalized and mutually reinforcing discourse of our present era has elevated to the status of primary and effectively sufficient explanatory variables for every problem that currently afflicts the body politic, but is drawn instead along the far more consequential and far less institutionally comfortable line that separates those who direct their energy, their talent, their time, their voice, and the full weight of their resources and their willingness to accept the friction and the cost and the mischaracterization that genuine engagement invariably attracts, toward the sustained creation of genuinely good outcomes for the broadest possible range of people, from those who, for whatever constellation of reasons their particular biography, psychology, material interest, and accumulated habit have assembled into something that functions for them as a worldview, apply those same considerable faculties, whether actively, passively, or through the entirely effective and entirely deniable management of their own highly calibrated inaction, toward the prevention, delay, dilution, co-optation, or full dismantlement of those same good outcomes, as Scott Adams observed with a bluntness that the staggering complexity of the matter might seem to argue the case against but that the essential, irreducible, and largely undeniable accuracy of the underlying observation supports completely:
"There are two kinds of citizens in the United States: Those who try to create good outcomes for all and those who try to stop them. Know which group you are in." --- Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays), September 13, 2020
The injunction embedded in that final and uncommonly direct sentence, "Know which group you are in," is not a rhetorical gesture deployed for its dramatic effect and designed to produce the brief, warm, and ultimately inconsequential glow of moral recognition that such formulations reliably produce in readers who find themselves agreeing in the abstract while changing nothing in the particular, but is instead, if taken seriously in the spirit and with the full weight of consequence in which it was plainly and deliberately intended to be received, an invitation to the kind of genuinely honest personal accounting that demands a rigorous interrogation not merely of what we believe about ourselves in the abstract, expansive, generously interpreted, and almost universally flattering way that nearly everyone, including those doing the most unambiguous harm to the most people at any given moment in history, believes themselves to be fundamentally decent, broadly constructive, and on the correct side of the moral ledger, but of what we specifically have done, are presently doing, have systematically chosen not to do, and will do tomorrow with the actual circumstances, actual capacities, actual relationships, actual influence, and actual opportunities that the actual and unembellished texture of our actual lives, stripped of all the self-serving narrative overlay with which we have furnished and decorated and made comfortable those lives, has placed directly and undeniably before us, because the distinction between the two groups that Adams identifies is not, at its most fundamental level and most honest examination, a distinction of character in the grand essentialist sense that assigns permanent moral worth based upon innate qualities conceived as resistant to the intervention of choice, but is a distinction of choice, renewed and re-contested and re-available for revision in every single moment of every single day in which the opportunity to do something genuinely useful or to decline that opportunity presents itself with the unrelenting and entirely unhurried regularity that anyone paying honest and sustained attention to the actual texture of their own actual experience will immediately, uncomfortably, and no longer quite so deniably recognize.
Complacent contentedness, then, is not the well-earned resting state of the virtuous, however persuasively and persistently it presents itself in that particular and comforting disguise to those who have the most to gain from that particular and comforting mischaracterization, but is the slow, largely painless, and almost entirely accountable accumulation of a thousand individual decisions made across the full span of an engaged life to remain on the sideline of the matters that most urgently, most consequentially, and most personally demand the kind of active, sustained, and personally costly engagement that only those who have resolved, in whatever moment of clarity their particular journey has afforded them, to belong by their actions rather than their self-description to the first of the two groups Adams names, are willing to provide, and the price of that contentedness, which feels in the private moment of each individual decision to decline like the wholly reasonable, entirely defensible, and frankly quite pleasant preservation of one's own peace and one's own carefully rationed energy for matters more immediately and more comfortably relevant to one's own daily life, is ultimately and inescapably paid not by the complacently contented themselves, who may well complete the full arc of their earthly tenure having never been summoned before any tribunal they were required to recognize as such and made to settle the account in any currency they were required to acknowledge as real, but by those who stood at the precise intersection of that accumulated inaction, that accumulated silence, that accumulated comfortable declining of the invitation to show up and be counted, and who needed someone to arrive, and found instead, as generations before them in analogous moments of analogous need have found, the characteristic, devastating, and entirely familiar absence of those who had decided, in the warm and uninterrupted comfort of their contentedness, that showing up was, when the full and honest accounting would eventually be done, someone else's assignment all along.
Walter Washington | MPA, REALTOR® | ABR® | AHWD® | C2EX® Certified Your Real Estate Advocate | linktr.ee/YourRealEstateAdvocate
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