We All Have A Tendency To Think That The World Must Conform To Our Prejudices.

Just like me fr

Hello

"Let's keep our insides on the inside."

-Yennefer of Vengerberg from The Witcher S2E7

This line had my brain tickled.

Canon m50, f4.0 15-45mm

"Nostalgia is truly one of the great human weaknesses, second only to the neck"

-Dwight K Schrute, The Office, S9E7

The Bystander Apathy

“Studies show that bystanders choose to remain passive in a case such as Kitty’s because they recognize it as, for example, a husband ‘beating up’ his wife– ‘family problems’. Thinking they have no say in it and that it isn’t their problem, bystanders decide to watch instead of helping. Because, as Nietzsche has said, other people’s suffering is strange to us. It is unknown- it is a foreign concept to us.”

According to Nietzsche’s philosophy, a crowd’s morality is life-denying. Reading about this topic made me think about the macabre death of Katherine Genovese. Incredibly close to help yet so far away.

But what causes this “Bystander Effect”?

Decades prior to the bystander apathy theory being created, Nietzsche had heavily critiqued ‘the morality of the crowd’ and our human values. Talking about topics such as activism, altruism and volunteerism and pointing out the fact that people were becoming more individualistic and less giving. Everything in our lives affects this. Whether that is the way our parents educate us, what we are taught at school and what ideals we learn about during our early years in life.

The Bystander Effect, otherwise known as The Bystander Apathy is a phenomenon where a bystander is less likely to offer help to a victim if there are other people around, or if otherwise, they are in a crowd. Boiling it down to a few points, the reason why this happens is because people will start avoiding responsibility or they will try to act as everyone else around them. Otherwise, their behavior completely changes from the latter when they’re put in an uncomfortable position as to not seem ‘rude’. The bystander’s behavior also changes depending on if a person is alone or with somebody.

The theory was spawned during the ‘60s after Kitty’s death. A woman getting no help while a killer attacks her even though 38 bystanders were there. So why did none of them intervene? Why did they let her die in such a manner when all of them together were able to fend off the offender?

Studies show that bystanders choose to remain passive in a case such as Kitty’s because they recognize it as, for example, a husband ‘beating up’ his wife– ‘family problems’. Thinking they have no say in it and that it isn’t their problem, bystanders decide to watch instead of helping. Because, as Nietzsche has said, other people’s suffering is strange to us. It is unknown- it is a foreign concept to us.

“All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy.”

— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

Art by Roberto Diaz.