The Hypocrisy of Caring

What does it mean to care about the world if you're doing nothing to better it? Just stop pretending. If you don’t care that much, admit it. Where does this “nice person” mentality come from—the idea that we must care about every horror across the globe? Do you genuinely care about Gaza? Do you even know where it is? Have you been there? What about Ukraine—do you know its borders? And Sudan—can you recall what's happening there? Probably not. They report less on Africa; it’s just not that newsworthy.

We walk around, armed with opinions on issues that neither touch nor affect us. If an avalanche kills people in the mountains, why would it matter to you? To be a “good person” today is to care about everything and do nothing. To feel perpetually bad about tragedies without taking real action. If your friend’s house floods, it touches your life, so you care, naturally. But what about South Lebanon, Armenia, Nigeria? Why do we pretend to care?

By simply questioning this, some will think I’m a bad person. I didn’t say I don’t care; I merely entertained the idea. So, if being “bad” means someone who doesn’t care about the world, does that mean Hitler was “good”? He cared deeply—though in disastrous ways—about reshaping the world. Napoleon too cared deeply, but did he make the world better? Or take Interpol, which the Nazis transformed and which still operates today. Or the metric system spread across Europe by Napoleon. Even modern highways owe some of their design to the Nazis, as do jet engines.

Yes, Hitler and Stalin were vile, yet they built the autobahn and the Moscow Metro, respectively. Napoleon expanded the banking system. Terrible men by many standards, each leaving their mark, while we, with our lofty morals, claim to care about the world and still struggle to keep our own homes in order.

Maybe these faraway issues are simply distractions from our own struggles. Is pointing fingers at distant places a way to drown out our guilt, to forget the moral compromises that got us here? We gloss over the barbarism of European colonization, the annihilation of native peoples, and the violence of 80 years ago. Human history has been violent, interrupted by only short reprieves. Perhaps, at our core, we are unjust, hypocritical, and flawed. If war came to us, we’d still mourn the dead children and call ourselves moral—but would anything truly change?