"Evil societies always kill their consciences"
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“Evil societies always kill their consciences” lands like an indictment, not a meditation. James L. Farmer Jr. isn’t talking about individual bad actors; he’s naming a system’s survival instinct. A society can’t keep doing harm at scale while feeling fully about it. So it doesn’t just ignore conscience - it hunts it down, discredits it, rewrites it, and eventually replaces it with something more useful: procedure, slogans, “law and order,” the comfort of normalcy.
Farmer, a key strategist of the Civil Rights Movement and co-founder of CORE, understood that segregation wasn’t merely prejudice. It was an entire civic machinery that had to anesthetize itself to function. The “always” matters. He’s pointing to a repeating pattern: when injustice becomes policy, conscience becomes a liability. That’s why evil societies don’t only punish dissidents; they cultivate a culture where dissent sounds like extremism and empathy is framed as weakness or disorder.
The line also carries a warning aimed at bystanders. “Societies” kill consciences, meaning ordinary people participate - through silence, through jokes, through bureaucratic compliance, through letting “that’s just how things are” stand in for moral judgment. Farmer’s subtext is bracing: the real battleground isn’t only courts or streets, but the inner life of a public. If you want to know whether a society is sliding toward cruelty, watch what it does to the people who still feel shame.
Farmer, a key strategist of the Civil Rights Movement and co-founder of CORE, understood that segregation wasn’t merely prejudice. It was an entire civic machinery that had to anesthetize itself to function. The “always” matters. He’s pointing to a repeating pattern: when injustice becomes policy, conscience becomes a liability. That’s why evil societies don’t only punish dissidents; they cultivate a culture where dissent sounds like extremism and empathy is framed as weakness or disorder.
The line also carries a warning aimed at bystanders. “Societies” kill consciences, meaning ordinary people participate - through silence, through jokes, through bureaucratic compliance, through letting “that’s just how things are” stand in for moral judgment. Farmer’s subtext is bracing: the real battleground isn’t only courts or streets, but the inner life of a public. If you want to know whether a society is sliding toward cruelty, watch what it does to the people who still feel shame.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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