Somebody Else's Problem: On Apathy as Antagonist
In fictionland, apathy is a severely underused pattern of human behaviour. In part, this is a product of the fact that characters taking initiative is exciting. However, I think the ability of apathetic behaviour to cause havoc is seriously underestimated.
Humans have a shocking ability to ignore 'somebody else's problem'. Relatively small-scale examples involve ignoring an immediate, limited problem-- for example, leaving an injured person lying in the middle of a motorway. The effect is more pronounced when other people are around. Psychologists call this phenomenon the 'diffusion of responsibility', whereby everyone watching an emergency assumes someone else will call for an ambulance, leaving them free to pop some popcorn and watch the show. In a story, this can be a big problem for your heroes if they get into a jam, and you don't have to invoke intervention by the bad guy, or have the world mysteriously turn against your protagonist. Some good old indifference will cause them just as much trouble.
On a broader scale, people have a hard time not being apathetic about things like political movements or the Evil Overlord taking over the government or an impending global ice age. Part of this is simply a defence mechanism which all of us have to keep from having a nervous breakdown every other minute. Even people who are activists tend to be passionate about only a few causes, because there are just so many hours in a day, and just so far one's empathy can be stretched before numbness kicks in. Part of it is our inability to 'scale up' our experience to understand things like sea levels rising or a trillion-dollar deficit or thousands of people being 'relocated'. The numbers are just too big, and it doesn't seem real, because it's overloaded the circuits of a brain which evolved to cope with things on a much smaller scale. Finally, unfortunately, there is a selfishness factor. If the Evil Overlord isn't coming to relocate your ethnic group to the middle of the wilderness, why bother making a fuss? There's nothing in it for you.
Once again, this is an excellent way to explain how the Evil Overlord came to power without the residents of the country being actually evil. Or how some other seemingly preventable problem got out of hand by the time your story starts.
Think about problems in your story which could be explained by apathy instead of malice. Or about unique problems apathy could create, and you'll have some potentially interesting plot twists. [image error]
Humans have a shocking ability to ignore 'somebody else's problem'. Relatively small-scale examples involve ignoring an immediate, limited problem-- for example, leaving an injured person lying in the middle of a motorway. The effect is more pronounced when other people are around. Psychologists call this phenomenon the 'diffusion of responsibility', whereby everyone watching an emergency assumes someone else will call for an ambulance, leaving them free to pop some popcorn and watch the show. In a story, this can be a big problem for your heroes if they get into a jam, and you don't have to invoke intervention by the bad guy, or have the world mysteriously turn against your protagonist. Some good old indifference will cause them just as much trouble.
On a broader scale, people have a hard time not being apathetic about things like political movements or the Evil Overlord taking over the government or an impending global ice age. Part of this is simply a defence mechanism which all of us have to keep from having a nervous breakdown every other minute. Even people who are activists tend to be passionate about only a few causes, because there are just so many hours in a day, and just so far one's empathy can be stretched before numbness kicks in. Part of it is our inability to 'scale up' our experience to understand things like sea levels rising or a trillion-dollar deficit or thousands of people being 'relocated'. The numbers are just too big, and it doesn't seem real, because it's overloaded the circuits of a brain which evolved to cope with things on a much smaller scale. Finally, unfortunately, there is a selfishness factor. If the Evil Overlord isn't coming to relocate your ethnic group to the middle of the wilderness, why bother making a fuss? There's nothing in it for you.
Once again, this is an excellent way to explain how the Evil Overlord came to power without the residents of the country being actually evil. Or how some other seemingly preventable problem got out of hand by the time your story starts.
Think about problems in your story which could be explained by apathy instead of malice. Or about unique problems apathy could create, and you'll have some potentially interesting plot twists. [image error]
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