At times, I am at a loss for words. Yesterday, listening to a speech about indifference, for example.

We live in a complicated world. We are all alone in the sense that neither we nor anyone else can get inside the mind and emotions of our companions, parents, strangers, or children. Indeed, one of the first impossibly puzzling thoughts I had in my childhood years was this:

Why am I me?

I recognized that my consciousness was accessible only to myself. Moreover, I wondered why my private ideas and overall awareness were planted solely in my brain and body. Why not in someone else’s being, I asked.

My question for today is different but related. Our separateness guarantees an imperfect grasp of others and the impossibility of being as easily touched by their sufferings as we are by our own. Of course, exceptions exist, as when our children are in pain, but it is not hard for some to look away from others. Indeed, it can be automatic, a defense mechanism that makes the world tolerable.

To look, to see, to recognize leads to searching one’s conscience and a question. Do I have a responsibility to help?

I met only one person in my long clinical practice who lacked the capacity for indifference to others’ distress. She was a bright, young teenage woman whose parents brought her to my office.

This girl could not watch television news without being tormented by human tragedy. It was unbearable, and her heartbreak was beyond her mother and father’s understanding and my own.

The most worthwhile discussion of indifference I have ever encountered was not offered by another mental health professional, but someone who had experienced it. Here is an excerpt from a speech he gave on April 12, 1999. A video of the speech prompted this essay:

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?

Of course, indifference can be tempting (and) more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor is of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can, at times, be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred, at times, may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor —never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Thank you if you are still with me, reading this, pondering, and feeling this. If you live in the United States, I am sure you are aware of the magnetic pull of indifference, the offer of escape from the endless news stories about poverty, cruelty, and unfairness.

I am sure you are aware of people taken into custody on the street, the reported lack of due process, and the 60,000 to 65,000 people said to be in ICE detention.

It is enough to cause some who are not victims to throw away their cell phones, computers, TV sets, and radios.

It is enough to enter a fantasy world of everyday life, or refuse to discuss anything political, day or night.

The man who wrote the words quoted above was Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. His entire speech is below. He hoped his audience would reflect on a topic called “The Perils of Indifference.”

The last word he utters is “hope.”

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The top photograph is called “Smokey World,” a 1959 work by Fan Ho. Next comes his “Triple Play.” The final image is “As Evening Hurries ” from 1955.