Are you a compassionate person? Do you feel bad for other people who experience some form of tragedy? Do you feel the desire to help them? Yes? Good. What a noble character trait. Except that isn't a character trait at all. It's what society expects of you. Anything else would be unacceptable. Imagine seeing people suffer and not giving a s**t. What a terrible person would do that? Only a psychopath would be so uncompassionate, ignorant and selfish. But that's not you. You are a good person.
Except it's not that easy. Nowadays we are bombarded with tragedies. Just turn on the news and you'll see all the tragedies of the day unfold right in front of you. You'll see people suffer the worst of fates. You'll see parents mourn their children, people who are crippled for life, disease, starvation, torture and uncountably many other ways to suffer. And even if you don't watch the news, there will be people in your shopping street, on social media or on billboards "raising awareness" for even more tragedies. Because that's what society has selected as an acceptable cause of action if you really can't do anything yourself. In that case, you need to "raise awareness", so that other people who might be able to help will know about it. The result is this emotional overload everyone in our society has to cope with these days.
But look at us in our beautiful, healthy, joyful lives, complaining that tragedies are so manifold. How could we just sit around, eat, drink, dance, play games, and laugh while so many people out there are so much worse off? And yet we do. Unless you are some kind of superhuman vigilante, you didn't act on all the tragedies you came to know about. There were calls for donations you ignored, activists in the street you just passed by and homeless people asking for your help that you just told to go away.
That's ok, though. In all of those situations you had perfectly rational reasons for why you just couldn't do anything at the time. Although a good person would have helped, a good person would also do the other thing you were doing and that one was more urgent, more important or only you could do it. You are making the most moral decisions. You are still a good person. At least, that's what you tell yourself. Because that's what we do as humans. We have this model of what a good person would do and judge our actions against that model. If we find any dissonance between what we did and what the model predicts would be good behavior, we rationalize our choices. We argue our case in the grand court room, which is our head, until the judge, which is our conscience, rules in our favor.
But while this process maintains our self image of being a good person, it still does something to us. The constant arguing, defending, pondering and excusing takes a toll on our subconscious minds. Deep, deep, down we know it's not true. We know that our actions were not guided by this moral code. We know that the cases where we didn't care to take any action were not just exceptional circumstances. Deep down we know that actually, we don't give a s**t. We are egocentric, selfish and lazy.
That's not the case for all tragedies, though. Sometimes you feel a connection to the people involved. You might genuinely feel like you're able to help or even like you are responsible. Those are the cases where you're much more likely to help. But for other tragedies, you couldn't care less about those people. The main reason you're not admitting that is because society expects it of you. Other people might care a lot about them and telling them that you don't give a s**t might really hurt their feelings. We are told that there are fates that no human being should ever need to suffer and if someone shows us instances of that happening, there is a social responsibility to be moved by it. It's just like when a mother shows you their baby, there's a social responsibility to find it incredibly cute.
This finally brings me to the point of this blog post: It's ok to not give a s**t. Just like it's fine if you don't find the baby cute, it's fine to not care about these suffering people. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably pushing some kind of agenda where they want to appear morally superior. But the fact that you don't give a s**t is already evidence that it can't be completely unnatural. Or do you think you are that special? Unless you never give a s**t about anyone, you're not a psychopath. Like all of these psychological terms, that is a spectrum, both ends of which are unhealthy.
So, next time you enter the court room in your head because you skipped an ad telling you to donate to a charity supporting starving children, tell the judge: "I'm sorry your honor, but I don't give a s**t about those children." And judge conscience may just answer: "Whew, finally, that's a lot of work off my plate. Guess you finally figured out that you're the legislative power in this identity of us."
Just don't tell anyone else. That's the tragedy of it all. Believe it or not, I'm taking a risk writing this blog post. I was careful to formulate this post as generically as possible, without mentioning any concrete groups of people, but if someone wanted to they could very well use it to paint me as an immoral individual. By saying you don't give a s**t, anyone can easily gain the moral high ground on you. So, unfortunately, a world where everyone pretends to care about every tragedy all the time is a Nash equilibrium.
I would love to live in a world where that's not the case. Where being brutally honest with ourselves and each other would be part of our cultural identity. Imagine how robust a society could be if we had less expectations of each others thoughts and thus a lot more access to them. How much less we would operate on false assumptions because the actions of others are not founded in true believes but in perceptions of an unwritten moral code. But I know that this world is a pipe dream. Something I will not experience in my life time. So, next time someone tells me about some people dying in a refugee camp somewhere and asks me to donate, I will say: "Oh no, that's so terrible! I'll definitely think about it."
