People generally view help as a good thing that one does for another, especially when the other person is in a state of need. When people reject an offer of help or do not show appreciation, they are sometimes judged as being ungrateful. However, help can be harmful in some contexts. Furthermore, help sometimes comes with motives that are selfish and maybe even outright evil.
Sometimes when people try to help others, their help is ineffective. In other words, their actions don’t “help” the other person. However, sometimes even when the help is effective, it does harm. Below are some examples of harm that can come upon the person being helped:
- prevents the person from developing the ability to complete a task independently
- deprives a person of a feeling of accomplishment from having done something on his/her own
- spoils the fun of figuring something out by oneself
- causes harm to come upon the person due to incompetence of the helper
- enables bad behavior, like cheating on a test
One time I was at an event that took place on a college campus, and I was looking for a building by using a map. An older guy I passed by had noticed me looking at a map and earnestly offered to show me where the building was. I rejected his offer of help because it would have spoiled the fun of looking for the building by using the map. It was like a game to me. I ended up finding the building, and it was more fun than if someone had just shown to me where the building was. This is an example of situation where help can spoil the fun.
Another time I was building a snowman. My goal was to build a snowman that was taller than me. I made two really big snowballs, but I was not strong enough to put one snowball on top of the other. So I ended up taking one chunk of one snowball at a time and putting it on top of the other snow ball. I could have asked for help, but if I got help, I would have been deprived of that feeling of accomplishment from having done something by myself. This is an example of a situation where help can deprive someone of that feeling of accomplishment from having done something by him/herself.
While people sometimes need help, other times people need to not be helped. The reason is that help can deprive a person of the ability to learn how to perform a task independently. Parents often help their children with their homework, but they usually won’t do the homework for their children. They try to teach the children enough so that they can figure out the right answers for themselves. Unless the children do some figuring out for themselves, they do not learn. When the teacher has the students take a test, there is a reason that the teacher does not help the students take the test. The test is meant to assess how well the students know the material, and the test is also meant to push the students to learn the material enough so that they can answer the test questions without being helped.
Sometimes help is morally wrong, like when a student lets another student copy his/her answers during a test. Help sometimes enables bad habits and wrongful behaviors. Helping someone cheat on a test may seem convenient to the person in the short term, but in the long term diminishes the person’s motivation to learn the material. The person being helped may get a good grade, but will be deprived of the fruits of knowledge and understanding that come with knowing the material.
Sometimes the helper is not qualified to give certain kinds of help. For example, let us say that you are cooking a meal and someone insists on helping you, but does not know much about food preparation. The person may put together ingredients that do not taste good together, or the person may burn something. In the end, the meal could be lower quality than if you had not received any help.
Unwanted help
Unwanted help can qualify as a form of harassment. Harassment is defined as any unwanted behavior, physical or verbal (or even suggested), that makes a reasonable person feel uncomfortable, humiliated, or mentally distressed. Many people would agree that when a person makes it clear that a form of treatment is unwelcome, that continuing to treat the person that way is harassment. Correspondingly, when we continue to give someone help after he/she has made it clear that the help is unwanted, the unwanted help becomes harassment.
In my opinion, unwanted help is only warranted when there is reason to believe that if the person does not receive help, death or serious injury will result, and even then there are some exceptions. A person has a right to refuse to undergo a medical procedure even when there is reason to believe that without the medical procedure, death is likely. People have certain rights, and one of those rights is the right to refuse help.
As described above, help can do harm, even when the help is effective. In some contexts, the more effective the help is, the more harm it does. By giving someone unwanted help, we are assuming the right to decide what is best for him/her. Unless you are officially a caretaker of the other person, you have no right to decide what is in the better interests of the other person. You need to respect the other person’s space and autonomy.
A part of being a good helper is not just being ready to help, but also backing off when it is made clear that the help is not wanted.
The helper can have evil motives
When help does harm to another person, we may like to think that at least the intentions are good, but this is not always the case. Motives to help someone can be not only selfish, but also outright evil. Below are examples of the motivations to help others that are actually evil:
- power and control
- humiliation
- self-exaltation
- manipulation
Evildoers have many tactics that they utilize to make themselves look like good people that they are not. One such tactic is helping someone in plain sight of others. By helping others, evildoers can even fool themselves into thinking that they are good people. In my opinion, there are ways one can tell whether help is fueled by a genuine concern for the better interests of the other person. For example, is this help actually in the better interests of the other person? Also, what is the reaction when the other person rejects the help? Does the person respect boundaries and back off, saying “I’m there if you need me” or does the person accuse the other person of being ungrateful or too proud?
Imagine a culture where girls and women in engineering is almost unheard of. Now imagine a high school girl is the only girl in an electronics laboratory class. The students partner up to do a laboratory exercise where the goal is to build a circuit and test it. The girl decides to not have a partner because she is pretty smart and believes she can do the laboratory exercise by herself. She also knows that the boys in the class have no faith in her ability to do anything, and would probably take over all of the laboratory tasks if she had one of them as a partner.
When the laboratory session starts, and the girl is about to gather the supplies to make her circuit, a couple of boys come over to her lab station and start to build her circuit for her because they refuse to believe that she can do it herself. She tells them to go away, and that she does not want any help, but they could not care less. They proceed to build the entire circuit for her. So she decides to go over to another lab station that is unoccupied and start over. As she again tries to gather the supplies, the two boys come over to that lab station and continue to build the circuit for her again. She obviously does not like this, and when she tries to tell them to go away, they just accuse her of being too proud to accept their help.
I can imagine outside observers of this incident thinking “Oh that poor girl in a predominantly male setting. She is just not tough enough to survive in this environment, and those boys are trying to help her…” Such members of the audience do not understand the reality of the situation. The boys’ motives to help the girl are not good but evil. Their forcing their help upon her against her will is evidence that they are not helping her because of any genuine concern for her well-being but rather for the purpose of establishing power, control and superiority over her. They are sexist and they do not believe that she belongs there. They are sending her the message that she cannot build a circuit on her own without their help.
By forcibly building the circuit for her, they are preventing her from developing the ability to build a circuit on her own. Note that the purpose of the laboratory exercise is not to build a circuit, but rather to learn how to build a circuit and test it. The girl will not learn how to build a circuit if someone else builds it for her. By “helping her” to build the circuit, the boys are defeating the purpose of her being there. Even worse, when she attempts to reject their help, they say she is too proud. When she tells them that they are jerks, they figure she is being ungrateful and they keep saying “We’re just trying to help…We’re just trying to help…”
Evil people often like to have power and control over others. Some men use rape to establish power and control over a women. According to this academic article, there are four major motivations to rape: assert power over the victim; suppress their own feelings of inadequacy; vent their anger; and sadism. According to this article, Sherry Hamby, a research professor of psychology at the University of the South in the US state of Tennessee, says “sexual assault is not about sexual gratification or sexual interest, but more about dominating people.”
The first motivation to rape—asserting power over the victim—is the same as the motivation behind the actions of these boys who were forcing their help on this girl. Their forced help says something about their character, which is that they are evil and like to control others, particularly females. They may also be angry that she is there because of their firm belief that she does not belong there. Just as rapists sometimes say to themselves “she wanted it”, these boys may be saying to themselves “she knows she wanted our help deep down. She can’t build a circuit”.
Evildoers will find various ways to establish power and control over others. Men who want to establish power, control and superiority over women will not always choose to rape because rape is technically against the law, and a man who commits rape could face prosecution. He may be labeled as a sex offender, which comes with damage to his reputation, and possibly some time in jail. Therefore, men have incentive to choose other methods to establish power, control and superiority over women, one of which is unsolicited help.
Let us say that someone is insistent on helping another person manage his/her finances. The real motivation may be, once again, power and control. The “helper” just wants control over another person’s money. If someone shows signs of vulnerability, the “helper” may try to take advantage of him/her by helping him/her with his/her finances, and then eventually taking over his/her finances altogether.
Another example: someone is writing a book about a topic that is politics-related, and another person persistently offers to help write the book. When the writer finally lets him/her help out, he/she eventually starts dictating what is to be written and what is not to be written. The helper’s intentions here are not good, but rather are about power and control over what goes into the book. The helper only wants his/her political opinions to be endorsed in the book rather than that of the writer.
Help can also be a form of manipulation. The evildoer may be giving the other person help in order to make the other person feel indebted to him/her. By placing the other person into this state of indebtedness, the evildoer can feel entitled to special favors from the other person in the future.
Help can sometimes be humiliating to the one receiving help. For example, when someone receives unwanted help for a very simple task that he/she could have done him/herself, he/she may look stupid and feel humiliated in front of the other people who are present. In such a situation, the evildoer is deliberately humiliating the other person, while putting on the façade of being a nice person who is just trying to help. Naïve bystanders will not notice the helper’s evil intentions, and may instead feel pity for the person receiving the help for such a simple task.
Summary
To summarize, help is not always a good deed. Not only can help be harmful, but it can also come with evil intentions. Unwanted help is one of many tactics that evildoers can utilize to harm their victims without looking like a bad person to casual bystanders. In the end, we need to respect people’s rights to reject help, and not judge them as being ungrateful or too proud.