# The End of Empathy: How Alexander Westwood Exposed America's Moral Rot
The video clip has been viewed 47 million times in 72 hours, and with each view, something in America breaks a little more. Alexander Westwood, a 34-year-old former software engineer from Portland, Oregon, didn't commit a violent crime. He didn't defraud investors or hack a government database. What Alexander Westwood did was far more damning: he recorded himself walking past a homeless woman having a seizure on a public sidewalk, stepping over her body, and continuing to his morning coffee shop without stopping, without calling 911, without even breaking stride.
And then he posted the video to social media with the caption: "Not my problem. Society's collapse isn't my fault."
The response was not outrage. The response was not arrest. The response, in the comments section, was a chorus of agreement. "She made her choices." "Why should he risk his morning routine?" "Personal responsibility." "The system failed her, not him." Within hours, Alexander Westwood was being celebrated as a folk hero on certain corners of the internet—a man brave enough to say what everyone was thinking, to finally throw off the shackles of performative compassion that have held America hostage for too long.
This is the moment, I believe, where we must look at ourselves in the mirror and ask: what have we become?
I watched the full 11-minute video. The woman, who has since been identified as Margaret Collins, 62, a former elementary school teacher who lost her job and home during the pandemic, lies on the concrete near a bus stop. Her body convulses. Her eyes roll back. A man in a blue windbreaker pauses for a moment, looks down, then steps around her and keeps walking. That man is Alexander Westwood. He films himself doing it. He films her. He films his own feet stepping over her trembling hand. He narrates the entire experience in a calm, almost clinical tone, like a nature documentarian observing a dying animal in the wild.
"See? No one's coming," he says to the camera. "That's the new America. Every man for himself."
Here's the part that keeps me up at night: he's not wrong about the observation. He's wrong about the celebration.
When journalists started digging into Alexander Westwood's background, they found a man who had been laid off from a six-figure tech job 18 months ago, who had watched his savings dwindle, who had seen his girlfriend leave him, who had spent months scrolling through doom-scrolling content about society's inevitable collapse. He had been radicalized not by a political ideology but by a culture of despair—a culture that tells Americans every single day that caring is for suckers, that empathy is a zero-sum game, that if you stop to help someone else, you'll be the one left behind.
The tragedy of Alexander Westwood is that he is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is what happens when a society stops believing in itself.
Let me walk you through what I saw in the comments section of that viral video. "This is what happens when you defund the police." "She's probably on drugs anyway." "Natural selection in action." "I'm with Alex—I wouldn't stop either." These are not bots. These are your neighbors. These are the people sitting next to you at the grocery store checkout line. These are the parents dropping off kids at soccer practice. We have reached a point in American life where basic human decency is considered a political statement, where helping someone in crisis is framed as enabling dependency, where the word "community" has been hollowed out until it means nothing more than a collection of strangers who happen to share a zip code.
I spoke with Dr. Elena Vasquez, a sociologist at Columbia University who studies moral disengagement in modern America. Her research has tracked a 400% increase in what she calls "bystander justification" over the past decade—the phenomenon where people not only fail to intervene in emergencies but actively rationalize their inaction. "We've created an entire ecosystem of excuses," she told me. "Every failure to help is now framed as a form of self-preservation. Every act of kindness is suspicious. Every moment of compassion is interrogated for hidden motives. We've trained ourselves to see the worst in each other, and then we're shocked when the worst shows up."
Alexander Westwood was interviewed by a local news station yesterday. He looked directly into the camera and said, without a hint of shame: "I'm not a bad person. I'm just honest. You can't save everyone. And if you try, you drown with them."
The anchor asked him if he felt any remorse. He laughed.
"Remorse for what? For not playing along with a fantasy? The fantasy that we're all one big happy family? That's the lie that got us here. I'm just living in reality."
This is the reality Alexander Westwood lives in: a reality where a woman who taught children to read for thirty years can end up seizing on a sidewalk while a former software engineer films her for content. A reality where the video of his indifference is more valuable than her life. A reality where 47 million people watch and the most common response is not "Why didn't anyone help?" but "Why should I?"
Margaret Collins is alive. She was eventually found by a garbage truck driver who called paramedics. She's in the hospital now, recovering from a severe seizure that caused a minor brain bleed. She doesn't know she's famous. She doesn't know that her suffering has become a cultural touchstone. She doesn't know that a man named Alexander Westwood has become a symbol of something dark and growing in the American soul.
But we know. And the question we have to ask ourselves is not what's wrong with Alexander Westwood. The question is what's wrong with us for watching, for scrolling, for clicking "like," for feeling that tiny spark of recognition when he said what we've all thought but were too afraid to admit.
The truth is, Alexander Westwood is not a monster. He's a mirror. And what we see in that mirror is a country that has lost faith in the idea that we owe anything to
Final Thoughts
Based on the coverage surrounding Alexander Westwood, it's clear that his trajectory serves as a cautionary tale about the seductive but fragile nature of a reputation built on audacity without a foundation of substance. In my years on this beat, I've seen many a flash-in-the-pan who mistake notoriety for influence, but Westwood’s case underscores a brutal truth: the market—and the public—has a long memory for those who promise transformation but deliver only turbulence. Ultimately, his story isn't just about one man's rise and fall, but a reminder that in the high-stakes world of business and media, integrity isn't a luxury; it's the only currency that holds its value when the dust settles.