Refusing to act is not only an option, but an active choice. Abstaining does not save you from the consequences of that decision, and you are just as involved as if you’d participated directly.
You know the trolley problem? A trolley rushes down a track that diverges; if nothing happens, it’ll run over five people. If you pull a lever, it changes tracks and runs over one person. Some people say that refusing to pull the lever absolves them of the trolley problem; they did nothing, so it’s not in their hands. They’re not to blame for the five deaths. “It was a tragic accident.”
The trouble is that they were standing by the lever, freely able to pull it, but they chose to do nothing. They weren’t tied to a chair and forced to watch; they had the means to make a change and chose not to use them. Pulling the lever and refusing to pull it: both outcomes are in their hands. Four more lives are lost because of the refusal to act.
Inaction is still an action. Staying out of it is a choice. Doing nothing and keeping the status quo is a choice not to rock the boat, and it becomes a contribution to that status quo. At any point, you could choose to do something else.
Don’t refuse to act because you think that inaction means you’re not responsible for your lot. Inaction is your choice, as is staying in the pit without trying to climb out. A 1% chance of joy is often worth fighting for when the other option is guaranteed suffering. Do something if you dare.
But that discomfort with ego death, with letting go of the trauma coping mechanisms that currently define and confine your behavior, means you’re spending most of your creative energy trying to rebuild your old ego after it breaks in a desperate and doomed bid to buy back into your naive complicity in your self destruction.
Ra, From Death, Lead Me to Liberation
We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. “I’m this way because my father made me this way. I’m this way because my husband made me this way.” Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.
Camille Paglia
Don’t wait to start standing up for yourself until you’re already doomed, your agency must start from a place logically prior to your embedding or you will be a slave to it and it will lead you to your death. Starting your resistance to your fate from a place downstream of your desire to survive will always collapse into itself as your survival is used as a lever to force you into a situation you absolutely cannot survive.
Ra, Quantum Suicide Decision Theory and the Multiverse
See also: You Are Not Trapped