[SE]

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active,” to “Participate,” to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, “do something”; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a “critical” participation, a dialogue, to silence- just to engage us in “dialogue,” to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters’ abstention is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today’s democracies.

If one means by violence a radical upheaval of the basic social relations, then, crazy and tasteless as it may sound, the problem with historical monsters who slaughter millions wan that they were not violent enough. Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.

-Slavoj Žižek

appearing in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections