We generally accept that the healthy have some obligation to help the sick, and that the wealthy have some obligation to help those who can’t afford basic necessities. I think the same logic extends further than we usually let it: people who have accurate information have an obligation to share it with people who don’t, and people who are less susceptible to being misled have some responsibility toward those who are more exposed.
The comfortable rebuttal is that everyone is responsible for educating themselves, building their own resilience, and not depending on anyone else. But that framing assumes a level playing field that doesn’t really exist. None of us built our own starting point — not our health, not our access to good information, not the environment that shaped how we learned to tell a reliable source from an unreliable one. Even with the best intentions, most of us land somewhere we didn’t fully choose, and it’s a little too convenient to then take full credit for landing well, or assign full blame to those who didn’t.
Part of why this matters more now is how easily people end up in separate information ecosystems that never touch each other. Once you’re inside one long enough, it stops feeling like a bubble and starts feeling like reality — and nobody sitting comfortably inside a worldview goes looking for the argument that would dismantle it. That isn’t a character flaw unique to any side; it’s what closed systems do to anyone inside them.
If that’s true, the obligation isn’t really about being right. It’s about staying reachable — willing to explain rather than dismiss, and humble enough to remember that understanding, like health and wealth, is something most of us got a head start on mostly by luck. The people who got that head start have some responsibility to extend a hand back, not because the people behind them failed to keep up, but because none of us were running quite the same race.
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