When Bystanders Film Crimes
We were drifting into passivity. Now we're taking action.
All of us have seen it: Smartphone videos of subway beatings and street crimes.
Each of those cases sparks some natural questions:
Why didn’t the people filming the crimes put down their phones and help the victims?
Why did the criminals feel that no one would intervene while they committed their acts of brutality?
A climate of passivity produced by rationalizations
One of the answers is the climate of passivity that has infected many areas of Western culture. The criminals, of course, are not passive. Like bullies, they rely upon and are emboldened by the inactivity of the bystanders. It also is likely that some of the witnesses who filmed the events will rush to rationalize their behavior by saying, “At least I did something!” even though their conduct did not block a single fist, club or knife.
The quest for rationalizations is itself a sign of weakness. Their value is highly inflated. I don’t want to hear whether the thug who beat up an old lady on a subway had a sad childhood or a meager breakfast. The thugs, cowards, and bystanders always have their reasons, and you can bet that on the last day of civilization someone, somewhere, will be writing a doctoral dissertation on the subject.
There is something rather twisted about people using expensive smartphones – a product of progress! – to film another person who’s engaging in the sort of violence that even ancient tribal members would have prevented.
But that’s one of the aspects of decline. It is different from collapse. It arrives slowly and, as it worsens, people begin to scan their memories for the warning signs that they overlooked.
It was in the late 1980s when social commentator and author Tom Wolfe said, “We’re entering into a period in which we’re busily relearning things that everybody knew seventy-five years ago.”
Well, if we relearned those lessons, we forgot to take notes. It doesn’t take long for the latest shiny bauble to distract us from what truly matters and nowadays life is filled with such baubles. In the modern world, people will not fiddle while Rome burns. They’ll be scrolling.
Consider what’s happened within recent memory.
Corporate chief executive officers permitted interest group shake-down artists to cow them into making large donations to questionable causes in order to avert protests and boycotts.
Medical authorities who’d warned against public gatherings during Covid made an exception for protest marches.
The leadership at The New York Times caved when young staffers protested an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton.
Universities became poster children for spinelessness. Look at the rise of antisemitism on American college campuses in the very wake of the October 7 atrocities. Look at the use of faculty diversity loyalty oaths. Look at how easily an equal result theory – equity - replaced the democratically adopted concept of equal opportunity.
The terms “troll” and “cancel culture” are only too well known in our culture. Bullies thrive in many of our schools because the school administrations and teachers are afraid to confront them.
That said, it helps to go back in time for some clues as to how we got to this point.
Willful blindness
Margaret Heffernan’s insightful management classic – Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril – is a good way to understand the craziness from which we are slowly emerging.
Given the odd behavior of recent years in which once widely accepted truths about basics (such as sex differences and freedom of expression) were turned on their heads, many of us have wondered how such extreme opinions could have seeped so deeply into societal and organizational fabrics before anyone objected.
At which point did we begin to neglect our responsibility to speak up?
Writing back in 2011, Heffernan, a former chief executive officer of several interactive media companies, cited an array of studies showing that the obvious may not be that obvious. Some of the findings are jarring:
· That the larger the number of people who witness an emergency, the fewer the number of people who will intervene. Thus, we become blind collectively to things that, if alone, we would have noticed.
· Even if we see things while in groups, we may act as if we did not notice them because we are in a group and it’s very convenient to assume that someone else will take action.
· We may rationalize our own troubling behavior on the grounds that “it can’t be that wrong if nobody’s stopping me.”
· Major infractions in organizations “require the work of thousands of people, all failing to see the moral implications of their work.” Heffernan shows that diffusion of responsibility can produce abdication of responsibility. Not my job!
· “We take our cues from those above us – especially in hierarchical organizations - and if they do nothing what are we supposed to do?” The old “I was just following orders” defense made during the Nuremberg war crimes trials is closely related to “I was just complying with the organization chart.”
When smoke enters the room
Heffernan cites an even earlier example from 1968. Psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley arranged exercises in which participants were told to fill out questionnaires. The key testing element was that as the participants completed the forms, smoke would slowly enter the room.
If only one person was in the room, he or she would, within a few minutes, check into the smoke and get help. If two people were present, however, someone would rarely report the smoke. The combined results of cases where there were three people in the room found that “only one in twenty-four people reported the smoke within the first four minutes, even though, by then, they could scarcely see.”
What clearly emerges is the assumption that someone will do something about a problem doesn’t jibe with reality.
Bullies and bystanders
There can indeed be a willful blindness that goes beyond self-interest. As the work of Latané and Darley demonstrated, even when smoke was entering a room, the people in that very room ignored a danger to themselves.
Hefferan cites all too familiar accounts where bullying is encouraged by the passivity of the bystanders. The bystanders, in essence, became silent accomplices and the bullies fed on that silence
Not that all of the bystanders had clean hands to begin with. As novelist Anthony Powell noted: “One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.”
And that’s a point to remember. We expect more from the nice people because they are the ones who should know better. They are the ones who should stand up for values. Often, they do so, with their own family and friends. But their courage and candor can surprisingly go wobbly when it comes to protecting societal values. If the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, then their silence is telling. They don’t preach what they practice.
Signs of revival
The shift away from a bystander culture is multi-faceted. Some of the following actions began earlier. Others are more recent. But the effect of all is converging.
The idea that technology would connect us to the world overlooked its capacity to isolate us and to reduce our people skills. More and more, people took to their screens and rarely emerged. They became the ultimate bystanders by joining the ranks of the virtually present while physically absent.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s campaign against permitting the use of smartphones in elementary and high schools has been a major step toward giving children a life with genuine conversations and improved conversation skills. Schools across the nation have been adopting policies limiting smartphone usage. The result is more conversations and better relationships.
These concerns were related to the warnings about technology issued by The Center for Human Technology’s film, The Social Dilemma, a Netflix video which has had over 100,000,000 viewers to date.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has done extensive studies exposing campus restrictions of freedom of expression.
Cancel culture is declining. Corporations are dropping divisive DEI programs and returning to classic equal opportunity for all.
The U.S. Surgeon General issued a report on the dangers of loneliness, a condition that can harm mental and physical health and which is exacerbated by the decline of communities and the rise of social media. Nations such as Great Britain and Japan have also acknowledged the seriousness of the loneliness problem.
The idea that technology would foster “sovereign individuals” who could operate as mini nations will face increasing skepticism. People hunger for connections just as they hunger for meaning.
Corporate leaders are now starting to speak out against the isolation of remote work and virtual conversations. This is important because the workplace often serves as a prime area in which people connect with one another. Many a marriage stems from the workplace.
The newly created U.S. Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) is expanding transparency in government and revealing dubious expenditures that were hitherto unknown. For the first time in recent memory, there is a serious effort to rein in federal spending and reduce the national debt.
An assertiveness is growing in the United States and elsewhere that would have been unthinkable a mere three years ago. There is a growing sense of personal control. As control rises, fear of unexpected surprises drops.
If the trends continue, in time the bystanders may be replaced by bold initiators who engage with others, listen to (and learn from) differing viewpoints, and aim for larger goals.
When that is achieved, the passive bystanders, the mere spectators, will be few in number. We will have replaced caution with courage.