"Human nature doesn't include all human beings. There are human beings who are indifferent to politics, religion, virtually anything"
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The line undercuts every confident declaration about what people are by nature. Philosophers and ideologues often say humans are political animals, religious seekers, rational calculators, or meaning-makers. Conor Cruise OBrien points to a stubborn fact: a great many people do not fit these portraits, and some are strikingly indifferent to politics, religion, or any grand cause. Human nature, then, is not a roster of traits you can ascribe to everyone; it is a rough sketch of tendencies that leave out large swaths of experience. The phrase "virtually anything" widens the claim to include temperaments that sit out not only public life but also passions that others treat as universal.
That indifference is not necessarily a defect. It can express temperament, a preference for private life, a protective response to overbearing institutions, or the aftermath of fatigue and despair. It can also be the privilege of those insulated from events that force attention. For political movements and religious authorities, the indifferent are both a frustration and a resource: they resist mobilization, yet their passivity can enable the determined few to set the course. History is shaped not only by fervor and conviction, but by the silent majority who refrain, look away, or simply live elsewhere in their heads.
OBrien, an Irish diplomat, statesman, and combative essayist steeped in the conflicts of decolonization and Northern Ireland, distrusted essentialist talk. His engagement with Edmund Burke sharpened that suspicion of abstract universals. He had seen both the power of ideas and the limits of claims about what humans must be. The reminder here is methodological as much as moral: treat human nature as a statistical cloud, not a law. Build politics, scholarship, and rhetoric with humility about the diversity of human responses, including the right not to care. Any project that cannot accommodate indifference will misunderstand the people it hopes to govern or save.
That indifference is not necessarily a defect. It can express temperament, a preference for private life, a protective response to overbearing institutions, or the aftermath of fatigue and despair. It can also be the privilege of those insulated from events that force attention. For political movements and religious authorities, the indifferent are both a frustration and a resource: they resist mobilization, yet their passivity can enable the determined few to set the course. History is shaped not only by fervor and conviction, but by the silent majority who refrain, look away, or simply live elsewhere in their heads.
OBrien, an Irish diplomat, statesman, and combative essayist steeped in the conflicts of decolonization and Northern Ireland, distrusted essentialist talk. His engagement with Edmund Burke sharpened that suspicion of abstract universals. He had seen both the power of ideas and the limits of claims about what humans must be. The reminder here is methodological as much as moral: treat human nature as a statistical cloud, not a law. Build politics, scholarship, and rhetoric with humility about the diversity of human responses, including the right not to care. Any project that cannot accommodate indifference will misunderstand the people it hopes to govern or save.
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