Dear reader,
Online commenting is not activism. Choosing not to share our opinion about any given current issue online does not equal complicity in whatever the perceived injustice is.
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There are various forms of the phrase ‘silence is complicity’ that now do the rounds online whenever a particular issue exercises the public conscious. When we see that line used, it’s easy to feel guilty if we don’t say anything, or to trot out half-baked opinions so we can signal to others where we sit on the issues at hand.
You’ll find plenty of people supposedly quoting the great Albert Einstein as saying “If I remained silent I would be guilty of complicity.” It gives it more weight if an intelligent famous man said it.1
For your interest, here’s what Einstein actually wrote. After acknowledging his devotion to gaining deeper insights into the structure of physical reality he said this:
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