Nothing is less innocent than laissez-faire

Nothing is less innocent, Bourdieu reminds us, than laissez-faire. Watching human misery with equanimity while placating the pangs of conscience with the ritual incantation of the TINA ('there is no alternative') creed, means complicity. Whoever willingly or by default partakes of the cover-up or, worse still, the denial of the human-made, non-inevitable, contingent and alterable nature of social order, notably of the kind of order responsible for unhappiness, is guilty of immorality – of refusing help to a person in danger.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 215