Could it be said that different countries have different levels of the care factor?

I felt when I lived in the UK it was a more caring and humane society than the USA; especially in terms of the social safety net. This is also true of France in many ways.

I do not, however, find New York to be a particularly unfriendly or dangerous feeling city. There is certainly an edge and a quickness there but I don’t identify it as unfriendly.

And while I consider the social structure of the USA as skewed to the individual rather than compassion, I don’t find that particularly true of the people for the most part.

I do feel secure in my country, the UK, but I think here some people are a bit of guilty of thinking that they have it tough when in actual fact they don’t when you compare it to a lot of other countries around the world.

I know when I go out somewhere that I am not going to be shot or carjacked or anything like that and I can think of a lot of occasions where I have seen somebody taking ill outside and people rushing out of shops to help them which I think shows part of the caring side.

I look at what happens in other countries on the news and at times my mind just cannot take it in and it just makes me think that the drunk person shouting come on ya bass is not as dangerous as they think they are.

Certainly. The Scandinavian countries are perhaps among the highest.

@Shippy New York is no longer unfriendly. They had a big campaign to change their image and it worked. It’s still a huge busy city, but there are a lot more helpful strangers.
Scotland struck me as a place that had a warm heart.

@janbb I’ve been watching a lot of You Tube lately and after seeing a few programs on disability, as a sideline a lot of the people in the story had best friends. One helped her friend everyday with her disability. I find that astounding. That would be very rare here. The program was based in the UK. Another had a friend in a coma, she visited for 20 years, which was a 3 hour drive, that was in the US.

@Sunny2 Yes, I didn’t want to say that on the net most of my friends are from New York. As maybe people would say that is not real life, you know. But to me they are very friendly. Plus quite open, honest and straight forward which I enjoy. So just goes to show. I have also heard that about Scotland.

While I have never been to another country outside of the US except Canada, I think the care factor you are referring to might change from place to place depending on the size of the place. I feel like smaller areas tend to be more closely knit, family names stick around, everybody knows their neighbors, what’s going on and are more willing to help when needed. Bigger more populated areas are less personal and more competitive. I kind of look at as comparing small, maybe more rural towns, to big cities. New York City and Philadelphia definitely have a tougher feel, whereas if you head to the south to smaller town you’re going to find that classic southern hospitality.

This is what Gandhi was getting at when he said, “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members”.

A strong commitment to equal rights is certainly a prerequisite for a “caring” society, but that’s not enough. There also has to be a prevailing ethos of interdependence. In the US, we do pretty well with the equal rights piece, but we also have a strong tradition of individual responsibility and social darwinism; there’s a simplistic belief that anyone who has merit and a work ethic will make it here, so it’s hard to feel much empathy for those who don’t.

Many countries are worse, some are better.