Ezekiel 9:9 · World English Bible
Then he said to me, “The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great, and the land is full of blood, and the city full of perversion; for they say, ‘Yahweh has forsaken the land, and Yahweh doesn’t see.’
Cruelty begins with the conviction that nothing is watching. Once a people persuade themselves that no eye records what they do, that the good has abandoned the world and judgment sleeps, every restraint dissolves.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Cruelty begins with the conviction that nothing is watching. Once a people persuade themselves that no eye records what they do, that the good has abandoned the world and judgment sleeps, every restraint dissolves. Blood fills the land and perversity fills the city precisely because the sense of being seen has died. The lie underneath the violence is that reality does not keep accounts.
But a person is always the witness to his own conduct, and something in him registers each betrayal whether he admits it or not. No man escapes that inner witness. To act as though you are unobserved is to corrupt the one observer you can never leave behind. The city becomes what its citizens believe about being seen. Tell yourself no one is looking, and you free yourself to become monstrous.
Clinical Psychology lens
Where am I counting on nobody looking?
He taught that your own judgment is always present with you, so there is no private act, only acts no one else happens to see. Character is what you do when the audience is gone.
The teaching is that the honest person behaves the same in a dark room as in a crowded hall, because the self cannot be sent out of the room. Shame is described as something you owe yourself, not the neighbors.
The witness inside you watches without taking part, and nothing you do passes it unseen. To imagine you act unobserved is simply to misunderstand what you are.
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Clinical Psychology