The Cost of Witness – Are We Complicit When We Watch and Do Nothing?

Every morning, I open my phone and step into a world of disaster. A war livestreamed on TikTok. A grainy clip of police brutality. A child screaming for help in a city I will never visit. And always, my thumb keeps moving. Scroll, scroll, scroll. My heart stumbles, but my hand doesn’t stop.

It’s a strange kind of violence: not the act itself, but the numbness of watching and moving on. We are the first generation in history to be constant witnesses to global suffering. Soldiers once carried memories of battle in silence; we carry them in our feeds, delivered in real time, looping endlessly. The battlefield is no longer “out there.” It’s in our pockets, buzzing during lunch break, waiting at red lights, interrupting our sleep. And still, most of us (including me) do nothing more than watch, wince, maybe share.

That leaves me asking: what is happening to our humanity?

Compassion Fatigue in the Feed

Psychologists call it “compassion fatigue,” the gradual dulling of empathy from overexposure. We used to grieve selectively: a neighbor’s loss, a community’s tragedy. Now we are drowning in multitudes of grief that we cannot hold, and our survival instinct tells us to look away.

The endless scroll doesn’t just deliver suffering – it normalizes it. A video of a bombing sits between a makeup tutorial and a dog video, tragedy flanked by trivia. Our brains learn to flatten everything into the same emotional weight: swipe, like, move on.

But when human pain becomes another piece of content, something precious erodes. We begin to see others not as subjects of dignity, but as objects in an endless stream. A child dying in a live feed becomes less a person than a story we consume in 30 seconds before scrolling to the next.

The Ethics of Watching Without Acting

Is passive consumption harmless? After all, what can I really do for a stranger in Gaza, or a protester in Tehran?

But here’s the moral danger: watching without acting can quickly slide into voyeurism. We risk treating suffering like a spectacle, a kind of “moral pornography” that shocks us for a moment, then leaves us unchanged.

Humanism insists that dignity is not optional. If I witness suffering, even through a screen, I am implicated. I may not be able to stop the war or dismantle police violence myself. But the moment I watch, I inherit a moral responsibility to do more than gawk. At minimum, I owe the act of remembering, of honoring, of refusing to let the algorithm turn suffering into background noise.

From Voyeurism to Solidarity

So what does it mean, practically, to move from passive witness to active humanist? I don’t believe the answer is grand gestures. Most of us can’t halt a bombing campaign or topple a government. But small acts matter more than we think.

Donating even a little to relief efforts. Calling representatives when human rights are at stake. Choosing to amplify voices at the margins instead of endlessly resharing violence without context. Even pausing, really pausing on an image of suffering, letting it break us open instead of scrolling past, is a form of moral resistance.

Because the truth is, numbness is not neutral. It is surrender. And humanism, at its core, is a refusal to surrender to despair or dehumanization. It’s a stubborn insistence that every face on our feed belongs to someone whose life is as vivid and irreplaceable as our own.

Reckoning With My Own Numbness

I won’t pretend I’ve mastered this. Too often, I’ve closed the app with a pit in my stomach, ashamed of how quickly I looked away. But perhaps shame is not the enemy. Perhaps it’s the beginning of accountability, a reminder that my humanity is fragile, and it requires tending.

To live as a humanist today is to wrestle with impossible questions. How do we stay tender without breaking? How do we keep witnessing without turning into voyeurs? How do we resist paralysis in the face of so much need?

I don’t have neat answers. But I do know this: if we stop asking those questions, if we stop caring that we scroll past another person’s suffering, then something vital in us has already died.

When the Screen Becomes the Battlefield

There’s a paradox here: most of us live lives untouched by war or state violence, and yet we are daily witnesses to them. The phone screen has become a window into atrocity, and what once demanded the bravery of journalists on the ground now arrives to us instantly, curated by algorithms that know nothing of ethics.

But the problem isn’t just what we see, it’s how we see. We see dismembered bodies not through funerals or rituals, but through autoplay clips sandwiched between cooking videos. We see a revolution not in a history book, but as shaky footage uploaded with captions like “can’t believe this is happening rn.”

The very form of this witnessing diminishes our capacity to treat it with reverence. Violence collapses into entertainment. Atrocity is made consumable. The question is not only whether we are becoming numb but whether our numbness is designed, even monetized.

The Economy of Our Attention

Every click, every pause, every horrified replay is harvested into profit. Companies have found ways to turn our empathy into engagement, and our engagement into money. The livestream of a bombing is not just trauma – it is data, it is advertising space, it is content that keeps us scrolling.

Think about what that means: the suffering of others is not just visible, it is commodified. What does that do to the soul of a society when grief becomes a market, when pain is packaged and sold back to us as “content”?

Humanists once warned that capitalism, left unchecked, turns people into things. Here, we see the prophecy fulfilled: lives reduced to clips, dignity reduced to views, grief reduced to impressions per minute.

The Myth of “Bearing Witness”

We tell ourselves that watching is important. We say, “The world needs to see this.” There’s truth in that visibility has driven movements of justice before. Videos of lynching victims in the past, recordings of George Floyd’s murder more recently, shifted history because people saw.

But here’s the danger: the rhetoric of “bearing witness” can become a shield against action. As if watching were itself enough. As if the mere existence of evidence were the same thing as accountability.

But accountability does not flow automatically from visibility. If anything, the more we see without acting, the more likely it is that sight itself becomes a substitute for solidarity. We become convinced that our gaze is justice, when in fact, our gaze without action is complicity dressed up as concern.

The New Violence: Spectacle as Control

Think of it this way: violence used to rely on secrecy. Dictators hid massacres. Police hid brutality. States censored. But now? Now violence is broadcast – sometimes by the perpetrators themselves. They know we will watch. They know our attention is a resource they can weaponize.

This is the new frontier: violence not as hidden crime but as spectacle. Terrorists livestream attacks because they know millions will consume it, amplifying their power. Police violence circulates endlessly, not always to drive reform, but often to intimidate and remind communities of their precarity. Oppression has discovered the algorithm.

What does that mean for us, the spectators? It means that watching passively is not neutral, it is part of the machinery. We risk becoming unpaid distributors of terror, unknowing accomplices in the very violence we oppose.

Humanism and the Burden of Witness

Humanism has always insisted on responsibility, on the idea that in the absence of divine rescue, the work of justice is ours. But this age of endless witnessing tests that principle. If I am responsible for every suffering I see, then I am crushed by a burden no one can bear. Yet if I claim no responsibility, I risk dehumanizing myself.

So where is the balance? I think it lies in reframing the witness itself. To witness is not just to see, it is to remember, to testify, to act in proportion to one’s capacity. Not everyone can become an activist on every issue. But everyone can resist the slide into apathy. Everyone can choose, in small but radical ways, to make dignity visible in their own sphere: talking to neighbors, raising children with empathy, writing, donating, disrupting indifference in daily life.

Choosing Depth Over Scroll

One of the most radical things we can do is to refuse the flattening of the feed. Instead of consuming atrocity as just another clip, we can stop and go deeper. Read the history. Learn the names. Sit with one story instead of ten. Refuse the dopamine hit of endless horror in favor of the difficult, sustaining work of understanding.

Because empathy grows not from endless exposure but from meaningful attention. Numbness thrives in breadth; humanity thrives in depth.

I fear sometimes that numbness is a form of cowardice. Not because we don’t care, but because we care too much, and caring hurts.

It is easier to scroll than to weep. It is easier to “like” than to mourn. It is easier to be outraged in the moment than to sit with grief for a lifetime.

But courage, in this age, may be nothing more than the willingness to feel. To let the suffering of strangers pierce our armor. To let ourselves be broken open, not once, but again and again. That doesn’t mean we collapse. It means we accept that to be human is to be wounded by other humans’ wounds and still rise with them.

Building a Culture of Active Witness

What might it look like if humanists built a culture that trained us not just to watch, but to respond? Imagine if our communities created rituals around global suffering spaces to process together, to grieve, to give. Imagine if schools taught not just media literacy, but moral literacy – how to discern when sharing amplifies dignity, and when it amplifies harm. Imagine if, every time atrocity went viral, we reflexively paired it with tangible aid, so that consumption was never detached from contribution.

We do not have to accept the feed as it is given. We can design countercultures of solidarity, where to witness is to move, where attention becomes the seed of action, not the substitute for it.

The stakes are high. If numbness becomes our default, we risk something greater than individual apathy; we risk eroding the collective conscience itself. A society that scrolls past suffering is one that prepares itself for cruelty. If we can see a thousand bodies broken and feel nothing, then what will stop us from breaking the next one ourselves?

This, I think, is the real danger: not that we grow indifferent to the pain of strangers, but that indifference becomes the water we swim in, the culture we breathe, the inheritance we pass down.

A Humanist Call

The philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said: “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.” Our feeds, for all their horror, give us that first step: they show us each other. But without the second step of solidarity, action, and response, we risk devolving into something less than human.

To be human in this age is not to watch without acting, nor to act without thinking. It is to integrate the two: to let our witnessing break our hearts open, and then to let our hearts move our hands, however small the gesture.

Because in the end, history will not remember how many clips we watched. It will remember whether we chose to turn our witnessing into solidarity or our solidarity into silence.

Reclaiming Empathy, Slowly and Radically

We cannot end the flood of suffering that fills our screens. But we can decide how it shapes us.

We can refuse to let the algorithm set our moral horizon. We can reclaim empathy in small, deliberate ways through attention, memory, solidarity, and care. The humanist project has always been about insisting on dignity in the face of systems that erase it. Our feeds are one more battleground in that struggle.

The question is not whether we will see suffering. We already do, every day. The question is whether we will keep scrolling past it as if it doesn’t matter, or whether we will let it matter enough to change us. Because in the end, our humanity is measured not by what we see, but by how we respond.