Complicity: How We Have Been Conditioned to Participate in Our Own Harm and What to do About It

Presenting my upcoming book:

Why Good People Learn to Look Away

Most of us like to believe that if we encountered injustice, we would recognize it. We would object and refuse to cooperate. Some of us would organize a solution. At the very least, we would put down our coffee and say, “Surely we are not doing that.”

History suggests otherwise.

Again and again, ordinary people collectively adapt to arrangements they would never have consciously designed. We learn to tolerate cruelty when it arrives as policy or an inane task, accept abandonment when it is disguised as procedure, and participate in harmful systems because everyone around us appears to be proceeding as though nothing particularly strange is happening. Complicity rarely begins with a dramatic moral surrender. More often, it begins with something more subtle, a schedule, a rule, an evaluation, or the quiet conclusion that resistance would be inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst.

My upcoming book asks a deceptively simple question: How do caring people become participants in systems that produce outcomes they would reject if they could see them clearly?

The answer I believe begins at school.

Schools do more than teach reading, mathematics, history, and the delicate art of requesting permission to use the restroom. They condition us in patterns of authority, when we are allowed to have a voice and when we are helpless. They condition our bodily position and movements or lack thereof, particularly when institutionalized harm happens. 

Schools do more than teach reading, mathematics, history, and the delicate art of requesting permission to use the restroom. They condition us in patterns of authority: when we may speak, when we must remain silent, and when we are expected to experience ourselves as helpless. They train our bodies as well as our minds—where to sit, when to move, whom to obey, and how still we must remain while institutionalized harm unfolds around us.

Students are required to witness one another being sorted into supposedly objective categories of intelligence, ability, behavior, and promise—as though complex human beings arrive from the factory conveniently labeled for their appropriate destinations. For generations, many students with disabilities were removed from general classrooms almost entirely; exclusion and separation remain built into many educational systems. And this exclusion is often digested as a form of policing one’s status in social relationships. Children placed in “advanced” groups, remedial tracks, special programs, or disciplinary rooms may not possess the language to explain what they are seeing, but they understand its message: the institution is sorting children, and the sorting will affect whose talents are cultivated, whose challenges are punished, and whose future will be treated as worthy of investment.

The sorting extends beyond the classroom. School-district boundaries, neighborhood segregation, local property wealth, selective programs, tracking systems, and disciplinary practices institutionalize racial and class inequality while presenting the results as differences among individual students. Young people watch students of color and those living in poverty subjected to heightened surveillance, harsher punishment, removal from class, and encounters with school police. Their classmates are rarely given a legitimate way to question these actions, defend the targeted student, or challenge the authority producing the harm. 

They are instead trained in enforced spectatorship: seeing an injustice, understanding that intervention is forbidden, and learning to continue with the lesson. In an adult, we might call this acquiescence or bystander complicity. In a child, we often call it good behavior. 

Yet somewhere beneath the official categories and carefully drawn boundaries, many children recognize the truth: society has been organized this way, which means it could be organized differently—more humanely, more generously, and around the radical proposition that no child’s diminishment should be part of another child’s education. 

The ways schools organize children’s relationships makes this ‘education’ even more critical. School organization decides who belongs together, how long those relationships may last, which adults hold authority, when communities will be dissolved, and how much control young people have over the social worlds they inhabit.

Year after year, children are sorted, ranked, monitored, separated, regrouped, and moved along. They form attachments to teachers and classmates only to have those bonds routinely severed by the calendar. They learn to compete with people they might otherwise help, to seek approval from authorities who barely know them, and to treat relationships as temporary arrangements inside institutions that remain permanent.

It is a kind of orphanization inside the school as an institution because it is a systematic weakening of durable human bonds, community belonging, and collective power through the ordinary organization of institutional life. It is not orphanhood in the literal sense; most youth live with relative(s). But in school, it is the production of people who are surrounded by others yet deprived of the stable relationships through which trust, responsibility, courage, and resistance and the skills needed are cared about, facilitated and grow.

This matters because isolated people are easier to manage. A child who expects relationships to disappear learns not to depend too deeply upon them. A worker who believes everyone is replaceable may remain silent when a colleague is mistreated. A citizen trained to experience public problems as private burdens may blame herself for conditions produced by policy. Once people have been separated from one another, power no longer needs to silence every objection. We become remarkably efficient at silencing ourselves.

This conditioning does not prepare us only to endure unjust systems; it also prepares us to reproduce them when power finally passes into our hands. We learn how important connections are in a sea of shifting relationships. The boys’ club assembled at recess does not disappear with adulthood. It acquires a conference room, a respectable title, and a budget, becoming the corporate “good old boys’ club” that controls access to jobs, contracts, promotions, information, and influence. Children who learn that belonging can be manufactured by excluding someone else may later mistake gatekeeping for leadership and favoritism for professional judgment. The playground was never merely a playground. It was a rehearsal space where we learned who gets to make the rules, whose exclusion counts as normal, and how easily a small privilege can persuade us to defend an arrangement we once knew was unfair.

This conditioning follows people beyond the classroom and into workplaces, bureaucracies, politics, and public life. It examines how repeated exposure to preventable harm can make the intolerable appear merely administrative. No sinister mastermind is required. The machinery often runs beautifully because decent people want to be “good,” so they complete their assigned tasks, meet their deadlines, and avoid asking what the entire machine is producing.

This is not an argument that teachers, parents, workers, or individual citizens are uniquely deficient. They are mostly s/heros making an intolerable system tolerable. Blaming individuals for adapting to powerful environments is intellectually lazy and politically useless. The more urgent task is to understand how those environments shape perception and behavior—and how they might be reorganized.

The hopeful truth is that complicity is learned, which means it can also be unlearned. Brain plasticity research demonstrates this is the case and it can be unlearned with concentrated focus quickly. Attention can be recovered. Relationships can be made durable. Communities can be organized around care rather than control, cooperation rather than manufactured scarcity, and shared responsibility rather than obedient isolation.

We are not condemned to keep adjusting ourselves to arrangements that make us lonely, passive, frightened, and easy to govern. We can stop treating disconnection as inevitable. We can rebuild the relationships that allow people to notice harm, trust one another, and act together.

And perhaps that is where meaningful resistance begins: not with the fantasy of becoming fearless heroes, but with the much more practical decision to stop abandoning one another.