We can be compassionate. But we cannot afford to indulge it and allow the unawakened to continue to slumber. We are in the throws of totalitarianism ascendant. A governing system that takes the populace that would rather not look at what is happening around them and turns them into the most destructive killing machine the world has ever known. Death wrapped up in a system of "normal" jobs that normal people go home to their normal homes after doing without ever having to contemplate what their normal job results in.

We are the "philistines" the author describes in the passage below. Most of us reading on Substack are not the elite, we're not a passionate mob pushing a radical agenda, we're not the dis-empowered poor. We are the comfortable, with private lives we retreat to for sanctuary and safety. Not obligated to create and protect a better society for others around us, not prepared to help others losing their rights and liberties by challenging and protesting the abusers tormenting them. Keeping our heads down so as not to draw fire. Doing our jobs. Being cogs in the machine. As it's written, right here, in the history described below. Being compassionate is no excuse to allow our friends, neighbors, colleagues and communities to retreat from their moral duties. This book details how Nazism and Stalinism transformed normal people into the most murderous societies the world has ever known.

From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" written in 1951 by Hannah Arent https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/mode/2up

(From pages 337-338) "Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit was not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event, such initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Absence of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and, in any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of coordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.

It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis' mass atrocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not by the military men nor by any other part of the coordinated masses of respectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who were typical representatives of the mob. Nor was Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after 1936, one of those "armed bohemians" (Heiden) whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual elite. Himmler was himself "more normal," that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement.' He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Goring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.

The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything — belief, honor, dignity— on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives."