Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

by Larissa MacFarquhar

She loved nice things, good food, good wine, and pretty clothes; she loved the security of money. She just didn’t love them enough to feel right about contributing to an unjust world. She believed that God wanted her to stand with the poor, and that was what she was going to do. To do it, she had to be poor herself.

The moral question here is less one of quality—What should I do?—than of quantity: When can I stop?

Enabling some lives to be less stunted was as much as a regular person could hope to do, they thought, even if larger, systemic evils persisted.

to judge is to believe that a person is capable of doing better; it’s to know that people can change their behavior, even quite radically, in response to what is expected of them.

Trying to help is at best useless and at worst damaging; but to stop trying to help is to give up on humanity. Humanitarians are condescending hypocrites, but they are the best of us.

Part of the reason do-gooders seem so strange is that they’re acting on their own. They are following rules that they laid down for themselves, driven by a sense of duty they have felt since they were too small to know what duty was,

What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people’s joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility.

Do-gooders learn to codify their horror into a routine and a set of habits they can live with. They know they must do this in order to stay sane. But this partial blindness is chosen and forced and never quite convincing. It takes a strong stomach to see the world’s misery, feel a sense of duty to do something about it, and then say to yourself, I have done enough, now I’m going to shut my eyes and close my ears and turn my back.

They, like anyone else, believe that they have duties to their families, but they draw the line between family and strangers in a different place. It’s not that they value strangers more: it’s that they remember that strangers have lives and families, too.

What if everyone decided that spontaneity or self-expression or certain kinds of beauty or certain kinds of freedom were less vital, or less urgent, than relieving other people’s pain?