Few of us who use swimming pools could imagine watching someone drown without rendering assistance. Yet that disregard for life is exactly what happened in June 2018 as a group of Florida teens, aged 14 to 18, mocked, jeered, and filmed a disabled man drowning, with one of the teens reportedly calling out, “You should’ve never gotten in there.” Again, in November 2023 a man nearly drowned in the River Ouse in England as a crowd stood by, with no one attempting to save him despite the presence of two flotation devices nearby. Again in May 2025, a man in Cork, Ireland, drowned as a crowd stood by filming the incident instead of rendering assistance and then posting the footage online. Again, there were life buoys nearby that might have saved the young man.
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The same thing happened some forty years ago in a Chicago suburb when a group of teens watched, laughing and mocking, as one of their number drowned nearly within reach in a home swimming pool, and no one made any effort to save him or call for help.
There is no law in most jurisdictions and most situations that requires one to assist someone who is drowning—only the moral law, which I hope will haunt those involved for the rest of their lives. Just reading of these events has stuck with me for years and decades. There is something particularly heinous about watching as someone drowns. Maybe it’s because drowning is a slow process that could be averted by prompt action. But to watch, and cheer, as a fellow human being—even a “friend”—gasps for air and goes under is especially horrible.
One has to ask how any individual would allow this to happen, much less a group of a dozen or more standing by and watching as someone drowns. What is going on in the minds of those who stand by and mock and laugh as another human being dies? How can this happen? But it has happened, probably more frequently than I am aware.
The crowd psychologist Elias Canetti, when describing “attributes of the crowd,” wrote that “The crowd loves density. It can never feel too dense. Nothing must stand between its parts or divide them; everything must be the crowd itself” (Crowds and Power 29). According to Canetti, in a crowd situation, no one chooses to separate himself from the crowd for fear of diminishing and threatened the coherence of the crowd. Perhaps this is the reason why so many just stand around and watch as violence takes place, and not just at swimming pools.
The anti-ICE mobs that have gathered recently in many cities are fueled by a similar crowd mentality. Canettti also stresses the crowd’s propensity to grow, swelling until it reaches a point of “discharge,” and then fading away. That is the pattern in the anti-ICE protests, which may begin with a few paid agitators but then attracts others, either onlookers or online. Soon there are hundreds pitted against a smaller force of officers. The mob is packed together and emboldened, stopping traffic into and out of ICE facilities and attacking ICE agents as they try to carry out their duties. Its leaders are screaming through bullhorns, threatening ICE agents and their families, urging the crowd on. When an agent goes down, a dozen protesters rush in to punch and kick, putting the agent’s life at risk as others look on and cheer. It is the same dynamic as at the pool drownings—no one stands up and tries to stop what is obviously wrong. It would not only put that individual at risk of being attacked; it also violates some deep, primitive law of the coherence of crowds and their tendency toward violence.
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Canetti’s study of crowds was fueled by the years he spent in central Europe during the rise of fascism. He saw crowds swelling to attack Jews with no one opposing them until finally genocide was carried out with almost no one speaking out. Even though Hitler never won an absolute majority at the polls, the German people were complicit in their shared hatred of the Jewish people and willingness to watch as other human beings were attacked, their homes and synagogues burned, and their businesses looted.
There is a lesson here about the depth of primitive crowd affiliation that lies in every one of us, and of the need to bring it to light and oppose it. Antisemitism is rising in America, and it must be stopped before it can go further. But not just antisemitism: white heterosexuals have become second class citizens in many workplaces and schools, and they are subjected to constant verbal abuse. Christians are attacked on college campuses and in the media—Charlie Kirk’s murder was just one extreme example of something that happens every day, usually in a less violent form, such as in classrooms where Christian ideas are ridiculed and Christian symbols strictly excluded. When I mentioned the name of Columbus in one classroom, I immediately had a student near the front spit out the words that “Columbus as a slaver and killer of indigenous people,” and no one in the class was willing to consider that he was actually a devout Christian, a courageous explorer, and the man who first brought Western ideas and technology to the Americas. It was enough to know that he was a “slaver” and all ears were closed.
It is chilling when a human being drowns as others watch without rendering aid, but there are others all around us who are subjected to harm, here in America and across the globe. It doesn’t require us to dive into rushing waters and sacrifice our own lives or to seek out anti-ICE mobs and single ourselves out for beatings or worse. But it does require us to recognize what is happening.
There is a mob mentality that has been let loose in America along with a coarsening of moral sensibilities and perhaps a thirst for violence on the part of those who are bored and dissatisfied with their lives. Even though most would not pick up a gun and assassinate or try to assassinate a public figure, there is an automatic reaction on the part of some to applaud those who do. This is not the behavior of a civilized people: it is closer to what Canettti observed during the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany. As a people, Americans need to return to a gentler, more restrained, more caring mode of discourse and behavior. And when we can, we need to “jump in the pool,” figuratively and literally, to save those whose lives are threatened.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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Image: Eric Sonstroem via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.