"Bowling Alone?" Another Look at the Reason for the Lack of Compassion

Holding a piece of paper that states "I fell on the floor by myself. Nobody pushed me," a man says to an old person who has fallen on the ground, "Please sign this agreement before I help you."


In researching for materials for my next article, I came across to this interesting news about an ongoing controversy in China regarding the newest health minister guideline on helping an old person . What I find interesting is this paragraph:

The guidelines, while ostensibly meant to be an encouragement to please help people in need, was seen to have the opposite effect because of the following tip: "Do not rush to help, but manage according to the situation." This guideline elicited gasps of disbelief around China, because while people may hate to admit it out loud, there is the unspoken agreement that over-eagerness to assist has never really been a Chinese trait.

The article continues the paragraph with two examples on the societal indifferences toward people in needs, which are the case of an 88-year old man who was left to die without anyone helping him, and the case of a woman who was stabbed in Pudong Airport, Shanghai.

Reading that, one cannot help to think about Bowling Alone: the Collapse and the Revival of the American Community, Robert D. Kaplan argues that the decline in the social capital is primarily caused by growing isolation of people from each other, that once people used to live together in the close-knitted society, but with the advent of the media such as television and video games, people tend to live alone and becoming less sociable. Well, there are also talks about the infamous bystander effect, that you tend to think there will be someone else who will help the victim, saving you from all the hassles.

Later in the article, however, the true reason was clear: the fear of lawsuit. China has been rocked by a series of lawsuits in the past few years, in which the elderly victims were suing the good samaritans, accusing them for being the culprits for the formers' predicaments. It took the good samaritans lots of money, time, and energy to settle the affairs. Talk about "no good deeds go unpunished!"

Still why the lawsuit? Is it because people are becoming greedy, the unfortunate impact of living in a growing capitalistic society? Well, of course there are scums on earth, wishing to extort as much money as possible, thinking their "misfortunte" to be the lottery ticket to riches. It is difficult, however, to attribute the same motives to these seniors' lawsuit going on.

Maybe, just maybe, these old people fear that they were incurring extra cost to their family? Even though in China it is believed that the Confucian value of respecting and taking care of elders are strong, there are many cases of elder abandonment, especially in a society that is currently jolted with so much changes and upheavals, due to the growing mobility of the youths, growing individualism, etc. In a fast-paced society, maybe taking care of the elders become seen as more of a burden, and in turn this creates a growing insecurity among the elderly population, especially in places where there's no safety net.