Apathy requires active interactional effort to sustain.

Evidence

This group seems to represent the picture of apathy; but that image took interactional work to produce. Political resistance and disengagement is not any more natural than involvement — mandatory irreverence and disconnection can be stifling and painfully tight, too. Buffaloes could not accomplish what they ambivalently set as their own project; lighthearted, easy, recreational conversation was too difficult when there was no trustworthy larger world to resonate with the smaller, private one. Because there was so little that members shared, or wanted to share, except for their very personal, intimate lives, establishing common ground in the group context was difficult. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 938

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Core inversion: disengagement is produced and policed through effort, not natural laziness — cooperation to avoid common ground is itself a form of collective labor.
• XREF: Central to reader’s thesis that solidarity is built through positive shared projects: absence of shared positive content forces common ground built only on shared disconnection. — connects to: Suppressing consequence-thoughts requires deliberate ongoing mental effort. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2200; Thought requires active engagement with a modifying cultural environment to be real — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1254; Apparent civic apathy is effortful cultural labor, not genuine indifference — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 169 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Suppressing consequence-thoughts requires deliberate ongoing mental effort. #exemplifies (0.92) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2200
• Thought requires active engagement with a modifying cultural environment to be real #exemplifies (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1254