On What We See — and What We Have Learned Not to See

By: Dr. Warda Sada

There are moments when the most urgent question is not what is happening around us, but what is happening within us.

It is not the events themselves that are most unsettling, but rather the widening gap between what is unfolding in the human sphere and the way we perceive it, process it, or repress it.

The human condition in which we live is not only the condition of others. It is our own psychological, social, and moral condition. It concerns how people learn to see — and to learn not to see; to feel — and to learn to stop feeling; to speak — and to learn to remain silent.

Sociologists such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann described how social reality is not a natural given, but the product of an ongoing process of socialization. We are born into a world in which we are taught what matters, what is marginal, what is considered normal, and what is deemed unworthy of attention. In this way, a space is created in which some suffering is “visible,” while other suffering becomes invisible — not because it does not exist, but because we have not been trained to recognize it as part of our reality.

Gradually, bubbles are formed. Not necessarily bubbles of ignorance, but bubbles of belonging. Inside the bubble there is a shared language, shared fears, shared memory, and a sense of “we.” Outside it are others — not always enemies, not always hated, but often unseen.

Social identity theory teaches us that human empathy is not distributed equally; it tends to concentrate within the in-group and diminishes as one moves farther away from it.

Hannah Arendt warned of moments in which people stop thinking not because they are evil, but because thinking itself is replaced by obedience, routine, and language emptied of moral meaning. This is not dramatic evil, but everyday, quiet, polite evil — the kind that exists when a person ceases to ask what their actions, or inactions, mean.

Modern society, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote, produces distance — physical distance, emotional distance, moral distance. When suffering reaches us through screens, numbers, reports, and technical terms, it loses faces and names. Distance does not erase responsibility — it merely dulls it.

To enable this distance, mechanisms of moral disengagement are activated, as described by Albert Bandura: changing language, shifting responsibility to “the system,” normalizing harm, and devaluing the humanity of the other. These are not mechanisms of exceptional individuals, but of entire societies seeking to continue functioning without confronting the human cost of their choices.

Yet this cost also has an internal dimension. Erich Fromm wrote about the escape from freedom — the human desire to relinquish moral responsibility in exchange for security, belonging, and certainty. When we stop seeing, we may protect ourselves from pain — but we also shrink our own humanity.

The deepest humanitarian question is not what is happening “over there,” but what is happening to us here. What we allow ourselves not to know, not to feel, not to remember — not out of cruelty, but out of adaptation.

Perhaps, within all this, the most basic human responsibility is not to demand of ourselves to feel everything, but to refuse to train ourselves to feel nothing. To preserve the small crack through which reality can still enter, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it destabilizes the bubble in which we have learned to live.

From this arises the responsibility for change. If humanitarian blindness is the product of socialization, language, and institutional structures, then change must be educational, political, and structural. Education that fosters critical and ethical thinking; a public sphere that allows complexity and freedom of expression; politics grounded in human responsibility and equality of human worth; and a legal framework committed to universal human rights — all of these are not luxuries, but conditions for a living democracy.

The change required does not begin with full agreement, but with recognition of the value of the human being as such.

This is a call for education that cultivates critical thinking, for responsible politics, and for a legal system committed to universal human rights. This change seeks to expand the boundaries of “we,” based on the understanding that a living democracy is measured by its ability to contain complexity and humanity.

In this spirit, I note the values presented by the “All Its Citizens” party, which offers a civic vision — and more broadly, a civic alliance — in which the central question is how we choose to live together, grounded in the recognition that justice, equality, and peace are mutually dependent and constitute the foundation of a truly just and resilient society.

In the spirit of the values of the “All Its Citizens” party, this is an invitation to expand the boundaries of “we,” not at the expense of identity, but through the recognition that a just society is measured by its ability to see every person as having equal worth. It is an invitation to a citizenship that does not become accustomed to suffering, to a politics not governed solely by fear, and to a society that refuses to train itself in blindness.

Preserving humanity is not a feeling — it is a civic, educational, and political stance.