The Era of Anxiety - 3
These days, people seem less willing to help one another. When someone falls on the street, others hesitate for a moment. Even in situations where help is clearly needed, people often take a step back. When we see scenes like this, we tend to say the same thing. The world has grown cold. But is that really true? Is it because people have become less kind than before? Or is it because being kind has become riskier than it used to be?
A few years ago, the term Pence rule became widely known. It meant avoiding situations where a man and a woman are alone together. When the idea first appeared, it drew a lot of criticism. Some saw it as a refusal of solidarity, an extreme form of self protection, or even a step backward for gender equality. But the people who followed it usually gave a similar reason. It was not that they did not want to help. It was that they did not feel they could bear the risk of being misunderstood.
What matters here is not whether that choice is right or wrong. What matters is the kind of environment that produced it. In a world where goodwill is no longer read simply as goodwill, where records and judgment move faster than explanation, even moral action starts to feel like a matter of risk management.
This change also appears in moments of crisis. Someone sees a person collapsed on the street and chooses not to step in directly, but only to call for help, or sometimes to walk away altogether. On the surface, it may look cold. But there is another calculation underneath it. If something goes wrong while helping, the individual may end up carrying the blame alone. People have seen too many cases where goodwill was not protected. In that kind of world, helping is no longer a virtue. It becomes a risk.
The same pattern appears in smaller moments of everyday life. Someone sees a wallet or a card lying on the ground and does not pick it up. They do not want to be suspected, or blamed for something they did not do, while trying to return it. Yet this kind of behavior is often dressed up as honesty or civic maturity. People call it a sign of a mature culture, one where you do not touch what belongs to someone else.
But this is less a sign of virtue than the result of living in an environment that teaches people it is safer not to get involved. Once the result of avoiding risk starts to look like cultural maturity, a problem that institutions should solve gets hidden under the language of personal character. Not helping begins to look like caution, manners, or maturity.
Immanuel Kant said that we should always treat other people as ends in themselves. To help someone is one of the clearest ways of treating them not as a tool, but as a person. The categorical imperative leaves no room for calculation. Whether it is risky or inconvenient, the right thing is still the right thing.
The problem is not that we have forgotten those words. The problem is that we live in a time when even doing the right thing can leave the individual carrying the full cost alone. Goodwill is doubted before it can be explained, and context is cut away before it can be considered. In conditions like these, the categorical imperative starts to feel less like a moral compass and more like a declaration that one is willing to take the risk.
But the problem does not end there. Anxiety does not lead only to passive avoidance. People sometimes step back to avoid responsibility, but at other times they scatter that responsibility under a different name.
Think of a parent who knows their child has the flu or a stomach virus, but still sends the child to daycare without saying anything. The pressure is real. Dual income families, gaps in care, and indifferent workplaces all matter. It would not be fair to ignore those pressures and blame only the individual. That is why people often say this. Do not blame the person. Blame the system.
Most of the time, that is true. Many problems do come less from personal malice than from broken systems. But the moment that argument starts covering even the wrong choice, criticism of the system turns into an excuse. In situations involving contagious illness, a basic sense of responsibility cannot be erased simply by saying that the structure made it happen. The cost of that choice spreads outward to other children, other parents, and the whole care setting.
What matters here is not a simple choice between structure and individual. To understand structure does not mean removing responsibility. It means asking together what line still should not be crossed, no matter the conditions. Otherwise, blaming the system becomes just another automatic response. Just as hatred simplifies judgment, so does excuse making.
We really do live in a strange age. On one side, people hesitate to show goodwill because they fear being left with the blame. On the other side, people speak of structure and too quickly put off responsibility. Some step back so they will not have to help. Others hide behind the system to make their own choices seem lighter. The direction is different, but the root is the same.
Anxiety lies beneath both. It is a society that does not feel able to bear responsibility, a society where the line of responsibility is unclear, and where people learn first of all how to protect themselves.
In a society like this, people do not simply become less kind. The very way kindness works begins to change. Distance no longer looks rude. It looks safe. Silence no longer looks like indifference. It looks like survival. People step back not because they want to ignore others, but because they do not want to get hurt themselves.
What we need now may not be some vague moral awakening. Telling people to be warmer or kinder cannot reach the heart of this problem. While we keep blaming the heart, the conditions do not change. And as long as the conditions stay the same, goodwill will remain trapped in hesitation.
What we need to recover is not a kinder heart, but the conditions in which kindness does not become a fault. A society where the person who helps is not made to look foolish, and where the person who should take responsibility cannot so easily hide behind the structure. A society where helping is not translated as recklessness, and where doing the minimum that decency asks is not treated as a loss. What we may truly need to recover is not warmth itself, but the kind of environment in which that warmth can still work without being twisted.
To see one another as human again is not to recover some heroic morality. It is closer to protecting the minimum conditions that keep us from pushing each other away, even in a time of fear. When those conditions collapse, the first thing to disappear will not be some grand idea of justice. It will be the ordinary impulse to help another person without hesitation.