We are increasingly abdicating personal responsibility and relying instead on public interventions. This signals a disastrous shift towards learned helplessness, leaving us unable to act when no helpers are nearby.
This trend threatens not only to erode our individual capacity to handle crises, but also to weaken society’s structural self-confidence and diminish our collective moral courage, writes Hanna-Karin Grensman.
“The safety chat is proving a success on public transport.” That is how the impact of the chat service, which since 2020 has enabled passengers to communicate directly with SL’s safety control centre, has been described. In concrete terms, it has doubled the number of contacts with passengers.
It is, of course, excellent that such a chat service exists. It is also clearly useful in far more unsafe situations than a telephone number would be, since contact can be made without drawing attention to oneself.
At the same time, we are seeing an ever-growing tendency to hand the problems we encounter over to “someone else”, often some form of public authority. And when someone else is formally responsible, I am relieved of responsibility. I do not need to overcome any discomfort or uncertainty I may feel about taking action.
I do not need to act firmly against someone who is disturbing or harassing another person, because there are staff for that. And when I do not act myself, I also do not gain the experience of dealing with difficult people, for example in public spaces.
The less experience I gain, the more uncertain I become in such situations. My confidence in my ability to protect myself, and others, diminishes.
My dependence on staff therefore increases. On the day when no staff are available, I may be almost entirely unable to handle the situation independently. This is how “learned helplessness” is created: the experience of being unable to act in a specific situation, even though, objectively speaking, I should be able to learn how to do so.
Learned helplessness makes individuals weaker and less secure, which increases the demands placed on the very staff in question. They, in turn, require more resources in order to cope with this increase.
In concrete terms, then, this chat service will lead to fewer people intervening in various situations, which will increase the need for security guards, and therefore the costs. Learned helplessness spreads into yet another area. Already weak moral courage is weakened still further, with potentially disastrous consequences.
That said, the solution is of course not to remove the chat service. I may possess all the moral courage in the world, but it is not always reasonable or appropriate for me to intervene on my own. There is a difference between courage and recklessness.
The value of the chat service is beyond dispute. But how do we counteract the learned helplessness that comes with it? How do we move forward in a way that increases individual capacity to handle crises, while also strengthening society’s structural self-confidence and our collective moral courage?
By each of us taking personal responsibility for maintaining moral courage as both a norm and a practice. In other words, by actively and consciously exercising it whenever the opportunity arises.
Developing such a capacity is good for the individual. It also reduces the risk of later feeling ashamed for not having acted when one believed one should have done so, but did not dare. It is good for the person being targeted, because the experience of having stood alone can have a greater and more lasting psychological impact than the violation itself. And it is good for society, which becomes a safer place when we take responsibility for one another.
So there are, quite simply, no excuses. At least not if one hopes to receive help oneself when the moment comes.
