"Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees"
About this Quote
Capek takes a word that usually arrives pre-slurred in political debate - relativism - and flips it into an accusation aimed at the people who pretend they hate it most. He’s not defending a mushy anything-goes worldview. He’s indicting the faux-moral hardliner who needs relativism as a bogeyman while quietly practicing something worse: selective deafness.
The line’s engine is the paradox “passionate indifference.” Indifference isn’t a lack of feeling here; it’s an active discipline, almost a trained reflex. To keep issuing “absolute decrees” with confidence, you have to cultivate a heat-protected conscience, a way of not registering dissent as morally relevant. Capek’s point is psychological before it’s philosophical: certainty isn’t just an idea, it’s a mood, maintained by refusing the friction of other voices. “Not to hear” is literal and metaphorical - censorship, propaganda, social pressure, but also the internal muffling that makes authoritarianism feel like clarity.
Context matters. Capek wrote in interwar Czechoslovakia as Europe’s political temperature rose: fascism selling absolutes, communism counter-selling its own, liberal democracy caught looking procedural and weak. He understood how regimes and movements survive on a kind of willful simplification. The barb lands because it exposes the hidden labor behind dogma: you don’t arrive at absolutes by being too principled; you arrive there by being too practiced at dismissing what complicates you.
Relativism, in his framing, isn’t the disease. The disease is the emotional technique that makes cruelty sound like order.
The line’s engine is the paradox “passionate indifference.” Indifference isn’t a lack of feeling here; it’s an active discipline, almost a trained reflex. To keep issuing “absolute decrees” with confidence, you have to cultivate a heat-protected conscience, a way of not registering dissent as morally relevant. Capek’s point is psychological before it’s philosophical: certainty isn’t just an idea, it’s a mood, maintained by refusing the friction of other voices. “Not to hear” is literal and metaphorical - censorship, propaganda, social pressure, but also the internal muffling that makes authoritarianism feel like clarity.
Context matters. Capek wrote in interwar Czechoslovakia as Europe’s political temperature rose: fascism selling absolutes, communism counter-selling its own, liberal democracy caught looking procedural and weak. He understood how regimes and movements survive on a kind of willful simplification. The barb lands because it exposes the hidden labor behind dogma: you don’t arrive at absolutes by being too principled; you arrive there by being too practiced at dismissing what complicates you.
Relativism, in his framing, isn’t the disease. The disease is the emotional technique that makes cruelty sound like order.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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