Last November, student groups went around getting the vote out for Election 2000. Did anybody really care? No. Last week, students went around getting the vote out for the ASSU and class president elections. Nobody cared.

Feeling cheated of the sound and fury of political passions running high, we go hunting for the villain responsible for this sad state of affairs. What was the cause of this non-drama in two acts? Student apathy.

Apathy. It’s an evil you should avoid. It’s a disease that Cowell can’t cure.

On this campus, apathy’s an insult of the highest degree. Call a Stanford student apathetic, and you negate the dynamism that he’s tried so hard to inject into his life. Apathetic premeds don’t make it to medical school; you’ve got to show the hours of community service and hospital volunteerism. The undergraduate admissions office is stuffed full of applications declaring that these students care — about politics, poverty, oppression, art. Once you get in, you have but one four-year-long-mission: To find your passion.

Apathy negates the entire Stanford ideal. Just kicking back ain’t gonna cut it. You can’t just play Frisbee; you’ve got to do Ultimate. You can’t just lie on the Oval; you’ve got to read that paper on optimal taxation theory. You can’t just watch the game and have a Bud; you’ve got to recite the stats and know the players, as well as hold interesting discourse about the beer-making process. (“Dude, I got this totally awesome brew kit on U. Ave. last night! So, like, I was tryin’ it out, y’know . . .”) Just chillin’ ain’t a good enough answer. You’ve got to be intense.

Conversely, political activism is noble. Those folks who are busy synergizing in an enchanted broccoli forest — what keeps them on a horrible dorm diet of mushy vegan gruel, day in and day out? It’s the knowledge that they’re not apathetic at all. They’re activists — the very antithesis of apathy. Man does not live by bread alone; protest can stir the blood, even as glucose levels drop. Protest is their way of life, their raison d’etre. They’re passionate individuals.

And so everyone here rails against apathy. Student groups mobilize en masse to fight against sheer lack of interest. Every issue, however banal, is politicized. The enclosure of the Foothills, the merger of language departments, farm wages, who’s the Humanities and Sciences dean, do you want to eat grapes or not — Stanford students grope desperately for issues they can fight for. We’ve got to show we ain’t apathetic!

We root out every news item that’s even vaguely controversial so we can organize marches and set up tables in White Plaza. (If you haven’t manned a table in White Plaza, by the way, you’re apathetic.) It’s like China’s cultural revolution, during which high school and college students competed to demonstrate ever more extreme degrees of ideological purity. But I want to suggest that apathy ain’t all horrible. Far from being a debilitating disease, apathy is a good thing.

Apathy is a sign that all is well.

For apathy to be an option, things must function even if you don’t care. A well-functioning set of political and social institutions is the necessary condition for apathy. Even if you don’t vote, American democracy will continue to work. Regardless of what you do, those resume-packers at the ASSU will continue to cultivate patron-client networks within the student body. It’s no surprise that apathy, both political and social, is most common in advanced industrial societies. It’s here that public institutions have proven their ability to function effectively, regardless of individual action.

Look around the world at cases of intense political activism. Take Indonesia. Right now, students protest in the streets, forest-dwelling tribesmen cut off people’s heads, separatist rebels burn natural gas fields and religious extremists set up death squads. Indonesians everywhere wonder whether the current president can last another month in office. There’s lots of activism. Indonesians can’t afford to be apathetic.

But is that what we want?

I’d much rather people be cynical about how nobody can distinguish Bush from Gore. I’d much rather our leftist friends stop caring about whether Nike operates sweatshops in Asia. I’d much rather Stanford students don’t know the name of the ASSU president.

Apathy is the luxury of a successful political order. It’s a product of institutional success. Getting upset over the fact that we’ve designed our society well — now that’s hypocrisy.

TQ Shang is a coterminal student in international policy studies. You can e-mail him at mazarin@stanford.edu, or not. He doesn’t really care.