The Dangers of Inaction

Answer quickly - if you see an accident on the street, what do you do? Stop to watch? Take a video? Flee? Call an ambulance? Approach to help?

Although the Webster dictionary defines action as “Doing of something”, in the human extent, the term has a much broader reach.

Action is everything we do, say, decide, and allow to happen. 

For instance, if I see that my toast is getting burned but I don’t do a thing and let it burn, the result (a charred toast) will be fruit of my decision of inaction.

If, on the contrary, I see that the toast is getting burned and remove it, the result will be a cracking toast, fruit of my decision of removing it and of my timely action.

Newton’s laws of movement can also be applied to our actions.

The first law states that an object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it. The third law states that, when two objects interact, they apply forces to each other of equal magnitude and opposite direction.

Thus, a problem will not change or be solved unless we act upon it, and every action elicits an inversely proportional reaction.  

In 1850, the Sharpe's London Journal of Entertainment and Instruction published the story "The Little Hero of Haarlem", about a nameless Dutch boy who, after noticing a leak in the dike that protected his city, he stopped it with his hand until the villagers came to repair the dike, thus saving the city from sure flooding.

As with all legends, this story is mostly fiction, but it illustrates an important point: the effectiveness of action, and how even the smallest actions carried out by nameless individuals can change the course of history.

How many of us would do as the little hero of Haarlem? Probably not too many.

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph 

is for good men to do nothing.”  - Edmund Burke

Why Don’t We Act?

The reasons abound. 

We usually do not act due to fear, indolence, ignorance, apathy, passiveness, convenience, indifference with the world around us, for self-protection, out of social convention, due to the belief that "nothing can be done", or anhedonia.

However, perhaps the worst kind of inaction is omission: knowing what’s wrong, having the chance to act to mend it, and still do nothing. Even the Catholic Church has a special section set specifically for sins of omission.

We have all at some point pretended not to see that which disturbs us. We prefer “not to see, not to hear, and not to say” a thing. But in the end, this protection of our comfort zone turns against us, because sooner or later our inactions end up backfiring.

“He who keeps silent concedes”, says an old saying. And although sometimes silence is the best answer, it can also be complicit in destructive actions by validating them through inaction.

Sometimes we need courage to break with the social and self-imposed blockings in order to take action.

Norman Rockwell, "Freedom of Speech"

Other times, inaction disguises as tolerance, preferring not to act instead of being regarded as intolerant or censorious.

But while tolerance is an indispensable quality for social harmony, its excess can also be damaging, by smoothing the grounds for behaviors and actions that, if recurrent, end up by weakening and destroying social harmony. 

We tend to live in a false concept of reality - that everything around us is immutable and will always be there. The truth is that the only permanent thing in life is change, and if we don’t care for the things we have, we run the risk of losing them. 

As stated by the philosopher Alejandro Vigo: “The rational thing is to be watchful against the naive optimism that takes for granted what we have and thinks that doesn’t need to be protected.”

Global warming and the climate crisis are a good example of this. 

Since the mid-20th century, scientists from all over the world warned about the dangers of continuing with the overexploitation of natural resources, overpopulation, deforestation, the warming of the oceans, the loss of ecosystems, etc.

Despite all the scientific evidence presented worldwide, the measures taken to prevent these predictions were weak and often late. We are all suffering the results of this inaction, and the future generations will continue to suffer them.

“Throughout history, it’s been the inaction of those 

who could have acted, the indifference of those who 

should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice 

when it mattered most that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” 

- Haile Selassie

The Dangers of Inaction

Aside from worsening pre-existing problems, inaction generates a series of negative effects in our lives, such as:

-Inaction makes us complacent. Many times, we refuse to act because the problem does not affect us, not thinking that someday it can also happen to us. This inaction normalizes the problem and convinces us that 'until it happens to me, everything is fine'. 

Even when problems are knocking at our door, we stay in our "comfort zone", waiting for "someone else" to do "something", even though we could contribute to the solution.

-Inaction makes us lazy, even to think. Over time, inaction becomes a habit and expands to all areas of our life. 'It doesn’t matter,' we think. And even though some things really don’t matter, when it becomes the usual response to even the most serious emergencies, we have a problem.

-Inaction numbs us and weakens our spirit. "Our lives begin to end the day we keep quiet about the things that matter," said Martin Luther King. And by "keeping silent" he also meant "remaining inactive" before what matters. 

Doing is an essential part of human nature, and when we renounce that right, a part of us dies.

-Inaction reinforces the perception that "we can’t do anything". Those who do not try always loose, says an old saying. When inaction becomes a habit, we lose sight of what we are capable of, for unless we test our abilities, we will never know how high we can reach or what we can achieve.

-Inaction atrophies creativity and performance. Leonardo da Vinci said once, “Iron rusts from disuse, water loses its purity from stagnation. Even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” 

If we don’t use our talents and abilities, we’ll lose them, and that includes our mental abilities and our capacity of creating. The more things we do, the more things we’ll come up with.

-Inaction makes us slaves and victims of others. Bruce Lee once said, "What you’re not changing you’re also choosing." We can’t hold anyone else accountable. 

If we do not act in favor of what matters to us, we leave the door open for others to do and decide for us, with actions and decisions that may benefit or harm us, but over which we will have no control. 

Principles of Effective Action

For an action to be effective it should follow certain principles.

-The action should be measured and consistent with the desired reaction. For instance, if you want to make friends at a party but you stay isolated in a corner checking your phone, you won’t achieve much. Neither will you if you go to the opposite extreme and act rowdily. Therefore, actions should be balanced and in line with the desired goal or reaction.

-The action must be concrete, timely, and proportional to the problem. An ambiguous action or one without a clear purpose will not attain the expected result. A late or delayed action is inefficient and sometimes even useless, and an excessive action (either too strong or too weak) will not achieve the desired purpose either.

-The action must be prudent. Reckless actions are often attractive, but they carry multiple risks for those who take them, and do not always deliver the desired benefits. Irrational actions often cause more harm than good and are therefore not effective. 

Well-thought actions, on the other hand, have a higher rate of success in achieving the purpose they seek.

-The action should not be destructive.  Destructive actions cause the inverse reaction to that desired. For instance, instead of gaining supporters for a cause -however just-, protests that destroy and vandalize public or private property, or that endanger others, arise transversal condemnation towards the cause represented. 

Destructive actions do not benefit either the victims of such actions or the cause represented, and therefore are not effective. 

-The action should not be merely reactive. Actions taken only as response to a problem or emergency are not always effective, because they often lack the necessary time and the conditions to unfold. Therefore, prevention plays an important role in effective actions.

In addition, long-term actions require planning and perseverance.

Destructive actions cause the inverse reaction to the one sought.

Greta Thunberg is a good example of how a single person can change the course of things. 

Mad about the lack of action of politicians over global warming, Greta decided to skip school every Friday and protest in front of the Congress of her country (Sweden), demanding more effective actions to stop global warming. 

Her protest became viral, and soon she was copied by thousands of students all over the world, organizing the movement “School Strike for the Environment”. 

Her popularity helped to visualize the problem, exerted pressure on the politicians to find climate agreements, and even took Greta to give a speech before the United Nations in 2018.

Another good example is the Ocean Cleanup project by the Dutch engineer Boyan Slat. 

Tired of seeing more plastics than fish in the sea during a trip to Greece, Boyan did not wait for anyone else to tackle the problem - he decided to create his own ingenious solution to clean the oceans. 

The startup that originated as a student project in 2011 nowadays has ships in rivers and oceans across the globe, and has helped to clean hundreds of tons of plastic garbage all over the world. 

However, activism is only one way to act. 

Joining a charity group, donating time and money to charities, volunteering, teaching children and adults to read, etc. are other ways to act.

But even small, anonymous actions - helping someone to cross the street, give directions to someone lost, yield your seat to someone who needs it, planting a tree, caring for a garden, contacting a long-forgotten friend, etc.- also have a positive effect in our society.

Every action makes a difference. 

That’s why it’s important to put the phone screen down and become aware of the opportunities around us. 

The human being is creative by nature. 

Not acting when you have the chance is the same as allowing bad weeds to invade your garden and eat up your home.

We all share the same responsibility in protecting and caring for our planet, our world, our community. Expecting that someone else should do something nullifies our right of action and relinquishes our destinies to the decisions and doings of others.

We may think that there’s nothing we can do, but that’s rarely the case - there’s always something we can do, however small. 

Sometimes we focus on all the things we can’t do and forget all the things that we CAN do. Sometimes a single action is enough to unleash a chain reaction.  

Because, as Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The future depends on what we do in the present.”

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