A collaborator engaged in election integrity work in Tarrant County recently shared this widely circulated line:
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
It is often attributed to Plato. The precise wording is modern, but the substance is his. In the Republic (Book I, 347c), Socrates observes that the chief penalty good men suffer when they refuse to take part in governing is that they must then live under the rule of worse men. The popular version simply sharpens the point.
People still ask how we arrived at the present disorder. One honest answer is generational. Many of us watched our parents and grandparents treat politics as something beneath them or already settled. They had their reasons. Relative peace and prosperity after earlier struggles made withdrawal feel reasonable. The cost of that withdrawal is now visible.
What troubles me more is the current fashion of doomerism. It presents itself as realism, but it functions as a counsel of despair. “Nothing can be done. Prepare the bunker. The handbasket is already on its way.” This attitude is especially cruel to the young. They have already lived through the COVID years, the ideological capture of major institutions, the devaluing of merit and competence, the open disparagement of young men in particular, and a host of medical and cultural experiments imposed on their generation. To meet their real wounds with the message that resistance is futile is not prudence. It is a failure of hope.
Civilization is handed on or it is lost. Every generation receives an inheritance and must decide whether to preserve it, improve it, or squander it. Those of us blessed to inherit the United States, relative health, education, and above all the gift of the Catholic faith, the sacraments, sound formation, and the knowledge of Jesus Christ, have received much. Scripture is clear: “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required” (Luke 12:48). Indifference is not an option open to us. Neither is the soft nihilism that pretends otherwise.
Show up. Vote. Work the local races. Support those doing the quiet, unglamorous work of preserving honest institutions. Form the next generation so they inherit more than resignation. Plato understood the political cost of indifference. Christ reminds us that to whom much is given, much will be required.
Deo gratias.