THE DAILY MOOD

When silence is betrayal

So there I was watching yet another Netflix show from the Marvel stable, Iron Fist.

The show oscillates between the realities of corporate sharks and everyday life and crime in New York, and the superhero warrior monk/long-lost heir from K’un-L’un, a fantastical other-dimensional land that touches base with Earth every 15 years. Barely three episodes in, the question it led me to had nothing to do with magical superheroes or cutthroat deals.

How brave do you need to be to step into someone else’s fight? Especially when you yourself are under no threat, and can stay out of harm’s way by simply doing nothing. The answer, of course, is very, even if the situation doesn’t involve guns, hatchets and Chinese triads.

In the series, a young martial arts teacher running a school in a rundown neighbourhood gets unwittingly involved in a ruthless battle between one of the city’s richest men and his army of goons on the one hand, and on the other, a man who seems no better than an innocent, homeless vagabond with a yen to find his chi. On TV, choices are always simpler with the scriptwriter on hand to direct you to do the ‘right thing’. In the real world, not so much.

They say when you are a hero and a building is burning, you jump right in to try and save those who are stuck. There are not many who are wired like that and that’s fine too. In any life-threatening situation, there are only some who can rise above the instinctual fear that leaves us immobile and that’s what separates the heroes from the rest of the world.

And there is some sense in the school of thought that believes that jumping into the fray when you see a gunman threatening to shoot someone in front of you is not only useless (unless you are a Navy SEAL) but could also make the situation worse. Calling the police is probably the better option.

But what about the times when it’s very much within our powers to step in and make a difference, and it’s not an emergency of any sort and no criminal injustice is taking place? The fact is we are still scared. The schoolyard bully could be just one girl, but for each one of these bullies, there will be at least one other, if not more who know that what’s happening is wrong. Peer pressure, the fear of befriending or standing up for the unpopular girl and becoming an outcast themselves, is what stops them.

Nothing changes as we grow up. For example, I remember someone telling me that even if she’s with a group of people discussing what she knows to be a complete untruth about a friend, she prefers to stay silent and not enter into the conversation at all. And I believe her when she says she means no harm, and that she just wants to ‘keep the peace’.

It’s not easy to stand up to the popular opinion of a group of friends, the viewpoint of a superior at work or even idle judgements offered around the water cooler. The reason why you have to be a very brave person to go fight on behalf of someone is much the same as it was in the schoolyard. The social cost of picking a fight, because that is what a contrary opinion would be construed as in any of those settings, may seem too high.

As social creatures, wanting to be accepted constitutes a large part of our mental makeup. Wanting to right a wrong, or that feeling that you really should say something, can easily be suppressed by the worry that takes over about who you are going up against and how they can affect your life. And searching for justification for inaction is never that difficult.

So strangely enough, Marvel’s Iron Fist reminded me of something that Martin Luther King Jr so eloquently stated in the anti-Vietnam war speech exactly a year before his assassination in April 1967: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal’.