The United States is the only country in a 25-nation Pew Research survey where a majority of people view their fellow citizens as morally bad. Not second-worst. Not near the top. The only one. Fifty-three percent of Americans said their compatriots have bad morals and ethics — making us the singular outlier in a global canvass that included Turkey, Nigeria and Brazil.

Canada, for context, clocked in at 7%. Oh, Canada ...

The survey was conducted in early 2025, before the current national mood curdled further. Imagine what it would show today.

Older Americans are the outliers among the outliers

Here's the one piece of data in this survey that matters most to readers of this column: Americans 40 and older were less likely than younger adults to rate their fellow citizens as morally bad — 50% versus 57%. A modest gap, to be sure. But in a country where pessimism about other people is now the majority position, being even slightly less cynical than the generation behind you is worth examining.

This age pattern, it turns out, is unusual. In most of the 24 other countries surveyed, older adults were no more or less likely than younger ones to condemn their fellow citizens. The U.S. reversal — where the younger cohort appears to be slightly harsher — doesn't have an obvious explanation. Pew doesn't offer one. But a reasonable case can be made.

Here it is.

People over 40 have accumulated enough actual humans in their lives — colleagues, neighbors, former adversaries, complicated friends — to know that sweeping moral verdicts about 330 million people don't hold up. You've watched enough political cycles arrive and recede, enough crises resolve in unexpected ways, enough people you'd written off surprise you, to develop at least some resistance to the idea that everyone outside your circle is ethically bankrupt.

What Gen X Has to Answer For — And Own

If you're a Boomer, a degree of unsentimental pragmatism is baked in. You've seen enough to know that history doesn't end, that things have been worse, that people muddle through.

Gen X is a more interesting case. This is a generation that built an identity around irony and detachment — a cohort that treated sincerity as suspect and emotional investment as a liability. And yet here we are, marginally more inclined than the generations behind us to extend basic good faith to other people. That's not what the Gen X origin story would predict.

What may be happening is that irony has a shelf life. Sustained contempt for other people is exhausting, and it turns out that detachment is not the same thing as cynicism. There's a difference between refusing to be naive and deciding that everyone around you is a moral failure. Whatever the mechanism, aging appears to erode — at least slightly — the appetite for the latter.

The Harder Argument

None of this is a feel-good story. Half of Americans over 40 still view their fellow citizens as morally deficient. That's not a ringing endorsement of elder wisdom. And the survey was conducted before the current wave of national anxiety, so the numbers are probably worse now.

But the underlying argument for kindness isn't that other people deserve it or have earned it. It's that sustained contempt that is corrosive to the person doing the condemning. The quick judgments we've grown comfortable making about people outside our respective bubbles — cultural, political, socioeconomic, geographic — don't cost them much. They cost us.

Kindness is not a natural reflex in traffic, at the end of a bad week or in the presence of the anonymous hostility that passes for discourse on social media. It takes practice, and the older you get, the more you understand that your habits are your character. You are what you repeatedly do — including what you repeatedly think about the stranger in the next lane.

The Pew survey is a useful mirror. The reflection it offers isn't flattering. But the slight, stubborn resistance to moral pessimism among older Americans suggests that something in the experience of living longer nudges people, however reluctantly, toward less certainty about who deserves to be condemned.

That nudge is worth following.

To find out more about Paul Von Zielbauer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema at Unsplash