Utilising the most trivial dishonesty – The power of the press consists in the fact that every individual who ministers to it only feels himself bound and constrained to a very small extent. He usually expresses his opinion, but sometimes also does not express it in order to serve his party or the politics of his country, or even himself. Such little faults of dishonesty, or perhaps only of a dishonest silence, are not hard to bear by the individual, but the consequences are extraordinary, because these little faults are committed by many at the same time. Each one says to himself: ‘For such small concessions I live better and can make my income; by the want of such little compliances I make myself impossible.’ Because it seems almost morally indifferent to write a line more (perhaps even without signature), or not to write it, a person who has money and influence can make any opinion a public one. He who knows that most people are weak in trifles, and wishes to attain his own ends thereby, is always dangerous. – Nietzsche
Nietzsche, in a fragment from Human, All Too Human, describes the mechanism by which the press acquires its power: not through the great resounding lie, but through trivial dishonesty — speaking or staying silent as party, politics, or self-interest demands. Each one tells himself: for such small concessions I live better; by the want of such little compliances I make myself impossible. And because it seems almost morally indifferent to write one more line — perhaps unsigned — or not to write it, the one who has money and influence can turn any opinion into a public one.
What Nietzsche describes is not a conspiracy theory. It is a disguised theology of the small sin.
The Fathers never named the great sin as the most dangerous one. Abba Dorotheos speaks of the small opening — not the door thrown wide, but the crack through which the enemy enters unnoticed, precisely because it is too small to be taken seriously. Evagrius goes further: the logismoi do not attack virtue head-on but slip in through the adiaphoron — through what appears neutral, indifferent, without moral weight. A line written or unwritten. A silence kept out of prudence. This is how the small thought works: not demanding betrayal, only a delay, a nuance, an omission that can always be justified.
Scripture holds the same measure for small things: „a little leaven leavens the whole lump” (Galatians 5:9; 1 Corinthians 5:6). It takes no great quantity of leaven to spoil the whole loaf — only that the little be left unnoticed, treated as insignificant. And Christ Himself ties salvation to exactly this threshold: „He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much” (Luke 16:10). There is no category, in the Gospel, of the insignificant compromise. Fidelity is tested precisely where no one is watching, on the unwritten line, in the silence no one will ever demand an account for.
Aristotle called this hexis — the stable state formed through the repetition of small acts, not through great decisions. One does not become dishonest through a single monstrous lie, but through the accumulation of a thousand unwritten lines. Virtue and vice, he says, grow out of habit, and habit is woven from things too small, each on its own, to merit moral judgment.
Kierkegaard named this collective phenomenon in one sentence that has outlived him: the crowd is untruth. Not because the crowd thinks wrongly, but because within the crowd responsibility dissolves — each one feels his is only one line, one voice among many, and so cannot be the guilty one. Hannah Arendt saw the same mechanism at work not in the press, but in the bureaucracy of extermination: officials who hated no one, who merely signed papers, who were merely „doing their job” — the banality of evil being nothing other than Nietzsche’s trivial dishonesty, multiplied institutionally.
Social psychology has measured this under the name diffusion of responsibility: the more witnesses to an act, the smaller each individual’s sense of duty to intervene — not out of malice, but from the tacit calculation that responsibility, divided among many, comes to almost nothing for each. Milgram’s experiments showed the same thing from another angle: ordinary people, with no inclination toward cruelty, went all the way not because they decided to do harm, but because each step was one degree too small to justify refusal — and cognitive dissonance did the rest, reinterpreting each concession as reasonable, even necessary.
What Nietzsche describes at the close of the fragment — the one who knows that most people are weak in trifles and wishes to exploit this — is not a new figure. It is the old face of the tempter, who never asked Eve to deny God outright, only planted a small doubt about a single commandment, concerning a single tree. All evil asks for only one line. Never the whole book.
This is why patristic vigilance (nepsis) is not exercised over the great temptations — those recognize themselves — but over the small thought, the line one is tempted not to write, the silence one can always justify as prudence. The measure is not the size of the deed, but its fidelity to truth, exactly where no one will see it and no one will reward it.
„But let your word be ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything more than this comes from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37).
