There are growing signs of indifference despite the democratic upsurge among youths and students against all forms of authoritarian power across the world. Who are indifferent and why? Who benefits from the culture of indifference? Is it natural to be indifferent in the age of indifference? The Pew Research Center report on “The Age of Indifference: A Study of Young Americans and How They View the News,” published on 28 June 1990, reveals that young Americans are more engaged with issues and less indifferent than the older generation of Americans. The older generation cares less, participates less in civic activities like voting, and is less critical of power, whereas young Americans are more engaged with world affairs and engage more in civic activities. Civic activism is higher among younger people than among older generations. Older people are more disillusioned than young people.
A similar study, “Political Disengagement in the UK: Who Is Disengaged?”, was conducted by the House of Commons Library in 2026. The Research Briefing of the study by Elise Uberoi and Neil Johnston was published on 30 September 2026. The study reveals that “older age groups tend to have more negative attitudes about politics and participate less in political activities” than younger people in the UK. The report also identifies that working people are more politically disengaged than the rich and the professional class in the UK. The generational gaps between 1990 and 2026 reveal that young people continue to resist the culture of indifference designed by market-led politics and society—a culture whose chief beneficiaries are the ruling classes and their crony capitalist allies.
Participation in the formal democratic process and in policymaking has been declining for the last five decades for various reasons. Fundamentally, bourgeois democratic politics led by the market has failed people and their needs. There is growing culture of democratic deficit of trust. Trust in the state, government, political parties, and leadership is dwindling because of the gap between promise and practice. Political parties and leaders have failed to empower people and ensure peaceful prosperity.
These failures have been accelerated by the politics and culture of depoliticisation over the last five decades, as capitalism realised that democratic politics for the empowerment of people is a threat to the capitalist system. Therefore, there has been a systematic campaign to depoliticise democracy in the name of ‘specialist intervention’ by technocratic policymakers and bureaucrats who act as agents of ruling elites and capitalist classes. So, the decline in democratic participation is not accidental but the result of systematic intervention for more than the last five decades.
Capitalist states and governments have used power to create legal structures designed to make democratic movements illegal and to brand leaders of democratic protest movements as anti-nationals. In the name of nationalism, undemocratic and authoritarian ruling classes and their right-wing henchmen destroy the conditions for deepening democracy, citizenship rights, equality, liberty, and distributive justice.
The eighteenth-century right-wing English writer, poet, playwright, and Anglican moralist Samuel Johnson’s oft-quoted remark that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” was designed to criticise the “false patriotism” of William Pitt, a fellow Tory prime minister of Britain. William Pitt’s grandfather Thomas Pitt, governor of Madras, known as “Diamond” Pitt, claimed to have discovered a diamond in the Kollur Mine near the Krishna River in Andhra Pradesh, India, and stole a large diamond from India. The Pitt family fortune was a product of colonial trade deals in India. Indian wealth gave the Pitt family profound power to control politics in Britain.
Unlike his fellow Tories, Johnson was opposed to slavery and colonialism. Therefore, he was critical of William Pitt, his family, and their colonial British patriotism. He considered British colonisers to be robbers. The anti-democratic ruling apparatus converted Johnson’s statement into the phrase “politics is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In reality, one can say that “contemporary patriotic right-wing politics is the last refuge of capitalist scoundrels.”
Nationalism and patriotism are often combined by right-wing forces to dismantle all forms of democratic practice in order to uphold the interests of the capitalist system, which breeds anti-democratic politics and an authoritarian political culture that undermines people and their democratic views and discontents. Democratic discontents are branded as anti-national and unpatriotic acts. Such campaigns not only produce a culture of othering but also indifference based on differences in political, cultural, social, religious, and ideological views and positions. Differences are converted into indifference toward the ‘other’ and later for ‘each other’.
Such constructed difference and indifference were crucial for the capitalist system to create conditions based on a productivist culture of competition, consumerism, the individualisation of pleasure, profit, and pain, and the destruction of collective foundations by capitalist markets.
The market, as a process and as an institution, further expanded the culture of commodification of labour, life, love, and livelihood, deepening an individualistic society where alienation and indifference are not merely outcomes but integral to the very existence, foundation, and expansion of capitalist society—a society where a few control wealth, leisure, and pleasure while many suffer under its exploitative and unequal order. It is the capitalist class who benefits from the culture of indifference. So, capitalism promotes culture of indifference as it breeds atomised individual consumers of commodities that defines them. The way ‘my car’ culture continue to destroy public transportation system, in the same way the culture of ‘my space, happiness, pleasure, utility and satisfaction’ is destroying the collective foundations of individual life and society where ‘lonely’ individual is the net outcome.
In this society, young people suffer under a system not created by them. Despite all the anti-politics machines at work and depoliticisation propaganda, young people and students are on the streets to reclaim their democratic rights. Indifference has become a business strategy of capitalism and a mode of governance for the ruling classes. It is easier to control and domesticate individuals than groups. Therefore, there are attempts to undermine all collective foundations of youths and students and to desensitise their collective and individual civic sensibilities.
There are systematic campaigns against young generations claiming that youths and students are deviants, drug addicts, drunkards, and lazy. Such campaigns are designed to undermine the moral compass of youths and students and their ability to revolt against all forms of power that exploit them. Young people are at the forefront of all struggles for social, political, and economic change in history.
Despite all odds, young people have never failed in the history of struggles. From anti-colonial struggles to contemporary anti-war struggles and peace movements, the majority of young people are out on the streets to reclaim their rights and liberties. Young people are deeply passionate about all forms of equality and justice. Hope blossoms in the resolve of youthful spirits to fight and win a world of peace and prosperity.
