To help someone in a difficult situation

People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too.
Sometimes it’s because they want to rescue someone.
This is more typical of young people, although the impetus still exists among older folks who are too agreeable or have remained naive or who are willfully blind. Someone might object, “It is only right to see the best in people.
The highest virtue is the desire to help.” But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it. Nonetheless, people will often accept or even amplify their own suffering, as well as that of others, if they can brandish it as evidence of the world’s injustice.
There is no shortage of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them are only tyrannical wannabes. It’s the easiest path to choose, moment to moment, although it’s nothing but hell in the long run.
imagine someone not doing well. He needs help. He might even want it. But it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper.
The distinction is difficult even for the person who is wanting and needing and possibly exploiting. The person who tries and fails, and is forgiven, and then tries again and fails, and is forgiven, is also too often the person who wants everyone to believe in the authenticity of all that trying. When it’s not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.

Something like this is detailed in the incomparable Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s bitter classic, Notes from Underground, which begins with these famous lines: “I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” It is the confession of a miserable, arrogant sojourner in the underworld of chaos and despair.
He analyzes himself mercilessly, but only pays in this manner for a hundred sins, despite committing a thousand.
Then, imagining himself redeemed, the underground man commits the worst transgression of the lot. He offers aid to a genuinely unfortunate person, Liza, a woman on the desperate nineteenthcentury road to prostitution. He invites her for a visit, promising to set her life back on the proper course. While waiting for her to appear, his fantasies spin increasingly messianic:

One day passed, however, another and another; she did not come and I began to grow calmer. I
felt particularly bold and cheerful after nine o’clock, I even sometimes began dreaming, and
rather sweetly: I, for instance, became the salvation of Liza, simply through her coming to me
and my talking to her.… I develop her, educate her. Finally, I notice that she loves me, loves me
passionately. I pretend not to understand (I don’t know, however, why I pretend, just for effect,
perhaps). At last all confusion, transfigured, trembling and sobbing, she flings herself at my feet
and says that I am her savior, and that she loves me better than anything in the world

-Fyodor Dostoevsky’s bitter classic, Notes from Underground

Nothing but the narcissism of the underground man is nourished by such fantasies. Liza herself is demolished by them.
The salvation he offers to her demands far more in the way of commitment and maturity than the underground man is willing or able to offer.

He simply does not have the character to see it through something he quickly realizes, and equally quickly rationalizes. Liza eventually arrives at his shabby apartment, hoping desperately for a way out, staking everything she has on the visit. She tells the underground man that she wants to leave her current life. His response?

“Why have you come to me, tell me that, please?” I began, gasping for breath and regardless of
logical connection in my words. I longed to have it all out at once, at one burst; I did not even
trouble how to begin. “Why have you come? Answer, answer,” I cried, hardly knowing what I
was doing. “I’ll tell you, my good girl, why you have come. You’ve come because I talked
sentimental stuff to you then. So now you are soft as butter and longing for fine sentiments
again. So you may as well know that I was laughing at you then. And I am laughing at you now.
Why are you shuddering? Yes, I was laughing at you! I had been insulted just before, at dinner,
by the fellows who came that evening before me. I came to you, meaning to thrash one of them,
an officer; but I didn’t succeed, I didn’t find him; I had to avenge the insult on someone to get
back my own again; you turned up, I vented my spleen on you and laughed at you. I had been
humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my
power.… That’s what it was, and you imagined I had come there on purpose to save you. Yes?
You imagined that? You imagined that?”
I knew that she would perhaps be muddled and not take it all in exactly, but I knew, too, that
she would grasp the gist of it, very well indeed. And so, indeed, she did. She turned white as a
handkerchief, tried to say something, and her lips worked painfully; but she sank on a chair as
though she had been felled by an axe. And all the time afterwards she listened to me with her
lips parted and her eyes wide open, shuddering with awful terror. The cynicism, the cynicism of
my words overwhelmed her.…

The inflated self-importance, carelessness and sheer malevolence of the underground man dashes Liza’s last hopes.
He understands this well. Worse: something in him was aiming at this all along. And he knows that too. But a villain who despairs of his villainy has not become a hero. A hero is something positive, not just the absence of evil.

Maybe you are saving someone because you’re a strong, generous, well-puttogether person who wants to do the right thing. But it’s also possible and, perhaps, more likely that you just want to draw attention to your inexhaustible reserves of compassion and good-will. Or maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace.
Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.

That you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.