A disturbing aspect of the Titanic disaster was that most of the lifeboats refused to pick up survivors in the water, the boat leaders fearing that the desperate swimmers would swamp the boats. I look on this sad incident as illustrating the problem of helping people in desperate need. How much risk and hardship should a potential rescuer be ready and willing to endure?
From time to time in my life, professional and personal, I have encountered desperate people who asked me for help. Sometimes these individuals have been total strangers. Sometimes they have been casual acquaintances who have asked me to provide them with a lot more time and effort than our relationship otherwise would warrant. They were desperate, however, and in such cases, the Golden Rule applies. You want to be kind, you want to be charitable, you want to help a fellow human being in need.
Most of the time, I end up regretting my instincts. The desperate people try to swamp the boat. I am the only lifeline they see, so they treat me as if my only function in life is to help them. They send me long documents, copies of undecipherable letters, keep me on the phone for hours, and are incapable of being patient. They are desperate, after all. “I will get to it as soon as I can” isn’t good enough. So they call, and they call, leaving long, involved, passionate voice-mail messages that fill up my mail box and stop business callers from getting through. If you don’t solve their problem on their time-table, they often become abusive or threatening.
As a general rule, desperate people without support networks are that way for a reason. They have personality problems. They make terrible choices. When I let them into my life even a little bit, most of them become a nuisance. The most poignant situations are when it becomes clear that I am an individual’s only friend, and therefore their ‘“best” friend. They really need friends, too, but their best friend, me, can’t stand them. I want to help them; I don’t want to be their buddy.
Ultimately, about five times out of six, these relationships end with me telling the individuals that I can’t spend any more time on their problems. Typically they begin interfering with my family life, or stopping me from doing my work. Even when I have actually accomplished some good for them before that point, they end up angry at me. There is no gratitude for the time I have spent talking to them or the things I may have accomplished for them—job interviews, for example. I didn’t solve their problems, so I have betrayed them.
Then I leave them in the water, because they will swamp the boat. And I feel guilty about it.
Is the solution not to try to help desperate people at all? Lower-middle class people who get large court settlements in personal injury cases often face a stark choice between alienating all of their friends and extended family, who have desperate money problems and feel that the successful plaintiff should be generous to them out of love and loyalty, and dissipating funds that are crucial to their future health care and welfare by helping desperate people in their family and social circle. The statistics on how frequently even huge damages awards are lost in a few years or even months are shocking. Some lawyers even advise such plaintiffs to move away and cut off all family and friends for their own protection.
I want to keep trying to help desperate people. Sometimes, it works. Helping others in need is a crucial component in living an ethical life. Still, I have had several boat-swamping episodes lately, and I am troubled, because I am increasingly tempted to sail on, as the screams in the icy water fade to silence.
Ethics Alarms 
Wow. That was a very moving piece of commentary.
I wish I could say that your story had no relationship to my life, and that you were a unique case. I wish.
Reconciling guilt resulting from conflicts between what our ethics alarms want us to do and what is actually best for us and our families is a classic ethical conflict. The problem is, when we sacrifice to desperate people, our sacrifice is often visited on other family members without their advice or consent.
My decision has been not to help the desperate directly, but through organizations that specialize in that effort. It is not nearly as satisfying as helping a person yourself, but the simile with “swamping the boat” is also apt because of the unintentional danger you can place not only yourself, but your loved ones in by trying to help people who are at the end of their rope. We have an ethical duty to those who depend on you that cannot be given short shrift out of a desire to do good, and to reap the benefits of helping the needy.
Now I feel guilty just for writing this. Great.
(Sorry!)
The problem is that the desperate people helped by organizations are seldom the ones who land on your metaphorical doorstep. My wife gave an HIV patient a place to stay while he was trying to get his life together, and he robbed her. We let our Bolivian baby-sitter have our 2nd car while she was desperate for transportation, with a promise to pay as soon as she had accumulated some money. Then she skipped to Bolivia. Yet they really were desperate, and no organization was going to help them. Is just saying “no” ultimately the ethical response, given the risks to your family and others?
This topic makes me uncomfortable too.
A completely moving and topical article and I’m sure something that everyone can relate, except Mother Theresa. Though I suspect that if I had put my problems on her, she’d smite me down for being so petty.
I think as a general rule, we do what we can and we don’t try to bite off more than we can chew. Having honest conversations up front with those we try to help can aid us in not creating high expectations. I think it is always important to be clear that you are not the answer they seek, but only someone that can help further their journey.
And then there’s the case where “helping” someone might hurt someone else. Or perpetuate the cycle of decision making that led to the regular requests for help. Or cause the helper so much stress and difficulty that it negatively affects the helper’s own family.
“Helping” is so often an incredibly fine line, and I trust that wrestling with it means that we are good people, or at least trying hard to be.
As the founder and leader of a Family Assistance program for 7 years, I can relate to this ethical issue completely. You feel my pain. I have intimately experienced an increbible variety of situations/issues. The following is a list of the things that I learned from the man falling over the edge of the building, extending his hand to you, and saying help me:
1. It takes an incredible toll on our own family everytime we walk out the door to help someone else.
2. Trying to deal reasonably with an unreasonable person will suck the life out of you.
3. Some people need help like junkies need crack.
4. It is hard to tell yourself “I don’t have the tools to help this person”, and it makes falling asleep at night very difficult; for someone who many expect to fix everything.
5. For some that truely need and appreciate your help it is less pain of guilt to slip beneath the waves than to extend their hand for yours.
6. An alcoholic or drug abuser NEVER appreciates someone who has their best interest at heart. They would sooner stab with the stiletto than face their own demons.
7. Dealing with these ethical questions can push you to the edge of your own sanity; for someone who dedicates their life to saving others.
8. If you reach out to take their hand as they fall over the edge understand that they will take you with them. All the while apologizing for the inconvenience they are causing.
9. Sometimes the only way you can help them is to make them swim closer to your boat while you paddle frantic toward shore.
10. I feel much better now. Thank you.
Buck: Thank you for your thoughtful, perceptive, sensitive, and wise commentary.
Well, I just got an e-mail from someone who wants me to call them about the murder of their son. I found out something about this case from the papers. I am afraid that if I call them, I am just going to end up telling them that there is nothing the police, prosecutor, or they can do about it. No evidence = no charges, no case. If they are calling me, they are desperate. I am debating whether or not to call. I just know this will not be pleasant, but I also can’t stand just to ignore a plea like this. You may need to add me to the swamped lifeboat rolls.
You have my sympathies.
I’d call. And regret it later. But somebody probably has to tell them, and the truth is the kindest thing you have right now.
Helping desperate people solve a problem without identifying the source of the problem (often some characteristic of the person) is likely where this mistake originates. To risk a cliché: “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for his life” really goes at this issue. If you don’t point out to someone, with candor, what the source of their problem is and that they MUST work at that source while you assist, then it is all folly and only curing the symptoms.
Quite simply: I’ll help you this time, but this you must work on yourself.
Then if they resist fixing the source of the problem, you simply tell them, “Then I don’t know what I can do for you or what to say to you”, because they don’t want to fix the problem, they just want a temporary salve.
So, swimming with by 2 year old this weekend and thinking of my 7 month old, an appalling scenario ran through my mind.
What if a person was aboard a sinking ship and was stranded at sea alone, treading water with both of their babies in their arms.
But they can’t keep treading for both babies, but they could keep treading for one.
…
Swimming Sophie’s choice.
There’s just nothing new under the sun.