Episode 31: Weaponized Gossip and the Danger of Indifference

Is gossip really harmless? Or is it one of the most destructive forces in how we remember—and forget—people? 

In this episode, I explore how gossip, even about historical figures like John F. Kennedy or Dag Hammarskjöld, is not just idle chit-chat. It corrodes truth, dehumanizes its subjects, and conveniently protects those in power. Gossip doesn’t just distort; it overwhelms. And when people get weary of sorting through contradictory stories, they fall into indifference.

Drawing on Elie Wiesel’s powerful warning that indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, I unpack how gossip creates decision fatigue, numbs compassion, and erases memory. Indifference is never neutral—it’s always on the side of the aggressor.

Links:

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/mutiny-of-brando-1963.pdf

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ewieselperilsofindifference.html

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/241 

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

#Gossip #DagHammarskjöld #JFK #Indifference #Podcast #DecodingTheUnicorn

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos! 

In Episode 31 of "Decoding the Unicorn" podcast, host Sara Causey discusses the connection between gossip and indifference, arguing that indifference can be more harmful than hate. She shares her personal bias towards her subject, Dag Hammarskjöld, and criticizes the media's tendency to reduce individuals to caricatures. Causey emphasizes that gossip distorts truth, dehumanizes subjects, and preserves the status quo by disengaging people. She references Elie Wiesel's speech on indifference, highlighting its role in erasing memory and humanity. Causey concludes by advocating for a nuanced understanding of historical figures.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

gossip, indifference, bias, narrative, caricature, media, stereotypes, truth, dehumanization, status quo, Elie Wiesel, memory, compassion, erasure, humanity

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 31 of decoding the unicorn the podcast. I appreciate you joining me in today's episode. I want to talk about gossip and indifference. Superficially, it would seem like there's probably no connection at all, or maybe they're antithetical to one another. I mean, if you're gossiping about somebody, you must have some interest in them. You must care about them one way or another, positively or negatively, right? Well, not so fast. And it may also seem that indifference is well insignificant, because if you don't engage with something, then you're not part of the problem. That's just simply not the case. Stay tuned.

Searching for your next great read? The kind of book you can't put down? Check out Sara's award winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn on amazon.com. Now back to the show.

I want to give a little backstory here, because even though I'll have to be necessarily vague, I think it will be helpful to have just a bit of context about why this has been on my mind. I saw something several days ago that bugged me, and I want to say that with any author, any artist, any content creator, we're human, and we're seeing a person, a place, of thing, a noun, of whatever, through our own lens. Monica we sack touches on that in the forward that she wrote for decoding the unicorn, when she talks about how we see people through our own prism. And that's true, and I certainly am not going to deny that about myself. In fact, I've tried to be as forthcoming as possible about it on my nighttime broadcast whenever I'm talking about various theories of this and that, I always encourage people go and read the information for yourself. Don't sit here and take my word for it. Go and watch that documentary, read that book, read that article, whatever it is, check it out for yourself and come to your own independent conclusions. Don't, don't sit here and take my word for anything. I would never want somebody to assume that I think I'm above everyone else, because I'm not. I'm a human being just trying to get by like everyone. And I also think it's important that if we are aware that we have a particular bias, we may have an unconscious bias that we sincerely don't know, a blind spot, so to speak, in our thinking. But if there's something that we know that we possess, I think we owe it to the audience to be forthcoming about that, and so I've never hidden the fact that I love DAG. I don't want to put a foot wrong. I don't want to do wrong by him for all the gold in Fort Knox, and I don't hide that. I'm not an academic biographer. I'm not somebody who is trying to live by publish or perish. I'm not trying to get academic street cred. I'm not a Boston Brahmin who went to Harvard and has all sorts of ivy league accolades, and I don't claim to I'm an artist. I'm a creative and a creator, and I revel in the freedom of that. My God, it's wonderful. But I don't, I don't try to hide the fact that that's the lens through which I see. Dag, my lens is not critical in nature, and I'm not the kind of person that wants to spend a lot of time creating things about people I don't like. There is an example that pops to my mind. I may have spoken about this before, but I remember reading an article or seeing an interview. It's been years ago now, but I remember Brando's biographer Peter man so talking about he went into Brando's story with one line of thinking and came out with another, and that he had a favorable opinion going in, and not so much a favorable opinion after he got done. And he wrote like a I don't know how long that book is, 1000 1100 pages, a tome, an absolute door stop tome about Brando. And he made the comment that, I guess he was just not what we all thought he was. We all thought he was a lot more than he was. And I was like, oof, that's tough, that that's an unkind cut. It's like when your parents say, we're not angry, we're just disappointed. Somehow that hurts more than if they yell and scream and they get mad and they say you're grounded for a week, go to your room. It's worse if they just shake their head and say, we're so disappointed we cannot believe that you behave that way. That's worse. And. I'm not the kind of person that wants to spend a lot of time if I go down a rabbit hole and I'm like, I don't think so. Why would I devote my life to talking about it? I feel like life is too short, and that's not the mission that I'm on in this incarnation, in this body. It's not what I'm here to do. And I just wish that other people were forthcoming too, because I saw this, this thing, you know, I'm not, I'm just, I'm not gonna go there, I'm not gonna start naming any names. I just saw something, and I was like, this is filtered through a lens of trying to make dag look a certain way and use a lot of dog whistles and euphemisms and make him seem like something that he wasn't. And I believe, and this is just my opinion. It's just my theory, and it could be wrong, but my theory is that it seemed to me, this person was constructing a narrative, as if to say dag was dishonest. Dag was not self aware. We've been led to believe that through markings, through his diary, he was painfully self aware and highly engaged in examination and knowledge of the self but really he wasn't. He was just a liar, like any other politician, same old, same old, and you can't trust what he says. And I believe that this person, again, my theory, which could be wrong is I think this person has the idea of telling others, because dag wasn't trustworthy. You can't take DAGs word for whatever it was. Whatever he said about himself or others is not trustworthy, therefore you should come to me. Like all roads lead to Rome, don't they. You should come to me. You should ask me what I think, and then I will be the arbiter of final truth. And I'm like, What are you? God? Like things like that just aggravate me. Okay, so we put that on one burner of the stove. A few days later, I heard this message, not by coincidence, totally a synchronicity type of moment. I heard this message, and the speaker was talking about a speech given by Elie Wiesel years ago. I'll look it up and see the exact date in a minute. But he talks about indifference and how we tend to think in binaries of love, hate, life, death, greed, generosity and so forth. But really the opposite of these emotions is indifference. So like, the opposite of love is really not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of hate is really not love, it's indifference. And I thought, whoa, whoa. I need to sit with this. I need to process this. Because this feels really deep and it feels really relevant. This speaker also talked about the parable from the book of Luke where Jesus talks about the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man has plenty to eat. He's very comfortable. Lazarus is a hungry and thirsty beggar covered in sores that lives or stays outside this man's mansion at his gate. And it's not that the rich man derides him, it's not that he kicks him or yells at him or screams epithets at him. It's that he ignores Lazarus. It's like he doesn't even see the man. And you know that he would have at his own gate in order to come and go from his own house, he would have seen Lazarus. He just chooses not to see him. It's like this man doesn't even exist to me. And then after they die and they're in the afterlife, one of the things that Abraham tells the rich man is that we're not going to give you any comfort here. You had your chance. The rich man is like, well, couldn't Lazarus go back and warn my brothers? I have five brothers, and maybe they'll repent and change their ways if they see a dead man risen from the grave. And Abraham's like, no, They have Moses and the prophets, so if they're not going to listen to Moses and the prophets, they're not going to be convinced by a dead man coming back from the grave trying to warn them about the error of their ways. And I'm like, wow, this is more a parable of indifference than I ever realized. So you have the rich man and fine linens having feasts. You have the poor beggar, Lazarus, who's sick and starving at his gate. And it's it's not that the rich man has been mean spirited or deliberately hateful to Lazarus. It's that he just hasn't seen him. He has turned a blind eye to this man's suffering and has done nothing. And another thing that I noticed, that I had never noticed before, is that the rich man still views Lazarus like he's a servant, like he's. Beneath him, even in the afterlife, because he doesn't say to Abraham, I wish that you would go. I wish that you would warn my brothers he's like, go send Lazarus to do it like Lazarus is His servant, or the hired help of some kind. I mean, it really, it hit me hard.

So I'm thinking about this parable, and I'm thinking about Elie Wiesel's speech on indifference, and it's like indifference becomes the actual opposite, and it not only becomes the opposite, it becomes a form of erasure, because let's take love and hate it. That's a good, tidy metaphor. When you love someone, obviously they're on your mind a lot, and you care deeply for them. But even with hate, you're still in a relationship with someone. You still have some entanglement with them, even if you don't really want to, you do, it could be destructive. It could be a destructive engagement, but it's still there. Hatred still acknowledges that this other person exists and has some significant it may be a negative significance to you, but you still see them. Indifference, however, is an erasure. It's as if you are saying you don't matter enough for me to even feel something about you. I just don't see you. Think about that iconic scene from Mad Men, where one of the characters has been let go and he tells Don Draper, I feel sorry for you, and Don says I don't think about you at all. That's cold. It's much colder than if Don had just hurled an insult. Oh, I'm Rich and you're not whatever, buddy. It's actually worse for Don to say I don't think about you at all. So when we think about the parable through that lens. Was the rich man sin that he was greedy or ostentatious, not so much it was that he was indifferent to the suffering of a beggar that was laying at his own gate. It would have been very easy for him to go out there with a glass of water and a meal and say, here at least you can have food and water, but you didn't do anything. And in this way, indifference becomes an alliance with the enemy, so to speak. And this is something that Wiesel points out in his speech. Again, I'll get there, but I'm trying to tie all these threads together first, it becomes a friend to the enemy. It becomes a way to aid the oppressor, because it's a form of quiet collaboration that ensures the status quo is not disrupted. Nothing is going to interrupt the harm that's been done. And I would argue that there is a gossip to indifference pipeline. I want to pivot for just a second to some early work that I did for decoding the unicorn, when Dag and I were co creating and I was doing my kind of initial draft and thinking about the direction of the book. One of the things that dag talked about was that he got tired of being reduced to a caricature, and he had complained to some of his friends that anytime he picked up an article in the newspaper, he saw a picture of himself or a cartoon of himself, he would say, that's not really me. It's a caricature of me, but it's not me. Everywhere I go, I hear, Oh, he's a mountain climber. He loves mountains and he loves TS Eliot. And it's like I've been reduced to that somebody that likes to climb mountains, apparently, 24/7 and who reads TS Eliot, apparently 24/7, and that's not me. One of the things that I thought about is how the media is a double edged sword, because it can throw rocket fuel on somebody's career, or it can obliterate somebody's career. I thought again of Brando, as you can tell, he's also someone that I have an interest in, and I and I know quite a bit about his life. In the early 60s, the filming for Mutiny on the Bounty dragged out and the budget became very bloated. The studio wanted a scapegoat, as the story goes, and it found one in Brando. There were some nasty stories that got propagated to the media about the way that Brando allegedly behaved on the set. And there was a scathing article. I'm sure it's still out there, and if I find the link to it, I'll drop it so you can read it here, if you choose to. There was. Gaming article that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post that outlined his supposed culpability for all the production delays with absurd behavior and crazy nonsense. He got in a canoe with a five gallon bucket of ice cream and ate it all by himself, and he was having relations with all kinds of women, and he was a diva on the set and all of this. Now, Brando had never been a media darling anyway, because he really didn't play The Hollywood Gossip games the way that other celebrities did through the 50s. And after this smear campaign, his career floundered throughout the 1960s and it really did not recover until the godfather. So there's no prominent person that we can say who is immune to the media sting. It doesn't matter if it's an Oscar award winning actor who's really considered to be the person the actors actor, the person that really brought method acting to the forefront and revolutionized the way that films were made, or a UN Secretary General, and I feel that DAGs comment to his friends about being reduced to a caricature is significant. Now we can also use JFK as another prominent example. Many people have heard of Marlon Brando, many people have heard of JFK. So we're talking about people that have more notoriety, shall we say, than DAG, there have been so many hit pieces that have been directed at JFK over the years, and they want to assure the public that he was somehow simultaneously a vapid him bow with no brains and no ideology of his own, but he was also a hyper intelligent criminal mastermind who was in with the mafia. He was a drug addict, a selfish Playboy, a planner of murders and some over sexed repository of venereal disease. And to me, the ultimate goal always seems to be the same, which is, whenever he was murdered on November 22 of 1963 nothing significant was lost. It wasn't anything special. Nothing to see here. Move along. The truth is that caricatures and stereotypes are harmful. Even if you're talking about somebody who's deceased, even if you're talking about somebody who was a politician or a political figure, it still matters. It still carries weight. I will also drop a link if you're not familiar. James di Eugenio wrote a fantastic article in which he debunks so many of the rumors that get flung out in JFK direction about the posthumous assassination of JFK. If you haven't read it, I will try to find the link and drop it in the write up for this episode. You absolutely should, because people this is sort of like with the cops. You know, we have to be careful Legally speaking, about ascribing motives to people that are alive. But it's like what the cops look at means motive and opportunity. What's the motive here? It's not just, Well, we think his brother pulled off the crime, or we think Sally Sue went after her neighbor, okay, but why? That's one of the things that police are going to look for. And I think that whenever we're playing detective, we should too like, what? What's going on with this person? Caricatures and stereotypes are harmful, and I think we know that whenever we start looking at like the caricatures of Jews from Nazi Germany or the way that African Americans were caricatured in the United States, racist caricatures and caricatures of Native Americans that were very and indigenous people that were very damaging. I think we can see it more clearly there, but we don't always see it clearly when we're talking about harmful gossip. And that's one of the things that I want to touch on today, because it is harmful. We tend to think in terms of idle chit chat blowing off steam. It's no big deal, but it is. So what I want to talk about now are three ways that gossip is not harmless, even if you're talking about a historical figure. Number one, gossip corrodes truth. It doesn't just fill in the gaps. It's not just hanging out at the water cooler and jibber jabbering. It actively distorts reality. And then when gossip is repeated enough, it starts to feel like fact, especially if it's attention getting if it's scintillating, if it plays into stereotypes or juicy narratives, people start thinking, Hmm, I've heard this several times now, where there's smoke, there's fire, so over the course of time, it reshapes how a person is remembered, and it often overshadows what's verifiably true. Number two, gossip is dehumanizing, whether you're talking about. Or JFK or Dag hammershould, or anyone else, the figure gets reduced to rumors and caricatures their real humanity, complexity. Hello, which all humans have complexity and dignity are buried under the noise. Gossip is a form of character assassination, even if it's dressed up as curiosity three gossip preserves the status quo. And this is a big one, a big one for me, especially when we start talking about means motives and opportunity. When you muddy the waters enough, John and j and q public, they get tired, they get burned out, they get weary and disengaged, and then here we go. That disengagement protects systems of power. So if dad gets dismissed as a weirdo, a cold intellectual snob, a secret pervert, somebody who was self unaware, somebody who wanted to lie to the public of JFK gets dismissed as a drugged up playboy. Nobody is going to look at their moral vision, their policies or their sacrifices. The Gossip becomes a shield for those who benefit from distortion, and it's like dangling a shiny toy in front of a puppy or a baby. Oh, hey, look over here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna jingle this shiny toy in front of you so that you don't see what my other hand is doing. And that is dangerous. It's not just rude, it's dangerous.

So in April of 1999 Elie Wiesel delivered a message at the White House titled the perils of indifference. And I don't want to talk about that now. I'm just going to highlight a few excerpts for you. We tend to think that indifference means no difference. But as Wiesel points out, there's actually this liminal space where the lines start to blur between light and dark, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment. Indifference can be tempting. As he points out, it's easy to look away from victims. It's easy to look away from people and say, I'm uncomfortable with their pain. I'm uncomfortable with their suffering. I don't know what to do. And as he points out in the speech, here's the problem, the person who becomes indifferent, it's like his or her neighbor is of no consequence anymore. From there we extrapolate. Their lives become meaningless, hidden or even visible. Anguish is of no interest, and so indifference reduces the other to an abstraction, and when you turn some other human being into an abstraction, they're not human anymore. They're just a general, vague idea, violence, oppression and genocide become much easier to perpetrate. That's very scary, very scary.

Another thing that he points out is that indifference is not only a sin, it is a punishment. I have argued many times that I feel like Nazi ideology is a poison. It poison. It poisons everything that it touches, not only the victims, but the perpetrators too. It's it's a disgusting, evil system. Indifference is not only a sin, it is a punishment That's deep. It's very deep. So now I want to talk about three ways that gossip breeds indifference and why that's dangerous. Number one, gossip is overwhelming. Contradictory. Rumors pile up. It reminds me also of the decision fatigue that we get. Like on the toothpaste aisle, you've got dozens of brands and different formulations and different flavors, and some are for adults and some are for kids, and some have fluoride and some don't, some have charcoal and some don't. You get decision fatigue, and that's what happens also with gossip, you start thinking, there's too many versions of this person. I give up, and then that surrender hardens into indifference. Two gossip numbs compassion when every story is sensational, secret lovers, secret addictions, betrayals, who was with who? And was the marriage real and and what was this person doing? People stop looking for the human being. They stop asking, What did this person stand for? What what did he leave behind? What was her legacy? What did she really think? Instead, they just shrug and they think it doesn't matter. Anyway. Number three, gossip erases memory. So Elie Wiesel also said that indifference is the enemy of memory. When gossip dulls people into indifference, the victim's true story is forgotten, and that's how legacies are destroyed, not only by slander or defamation, but by neglect, and when we do. Deny someone their humanity, we betray our own. And I think that's another way, as he said, that indifference is not only a sin, it's a punishment. Just some food for thought. If I have any final thing to say here, it's just that it's so important to me for dag not to slip into the realm of stereotype, wild assumptions and caricatures. He was a complicated, complex human being, and he's worthy. His life is worthy of exploration, and I do not feel I've not found anything in my research to make me think that dag was a liar and that DAGs own interpretation of himself is untrustworthy, and I would personally question the motives of institutions or beings that are saying that kind of thing. Again, just food for thought. Take good care, and I'll see you next time.

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