Psychologists call it “learned helplessness”. People just call it “it is what it is”. Both terms describe the same phenomenon: the exhaustion that comes from continuing to believe that your efforts matter.
In 1998, psychologist Roy Baumeister published one of the most frequently cited studies in recent decades in the field of social psychology. Participants were asked to resist the temptation to eat chocolate and instead eat raw radishes. Later, the same group was given the task of solving a difficult puzzle. The researcher found that this group gave up significantly faster than those who had eaten chocolate without restriction. This led to the theory of self-control depletion, which states that willpower is a limited resource. Once depleted in one area, less is available for another.
The study was contested from the moment it was released. After contradictory results were produced by its replications, the theory was refined and nuanced. However, one line of research remained valid despite the criticism: the link between cognitive depletion and moral behaviour. Tired people tend to make less ethical decisions because they lack the mental energy to act better. Honesty, generosity, and the ability to resist small temptations all come at a cost, and when the reserves are depleted, people act on whatever is left.
Studies have examined how this phenomenon plays out on an individual level. But what happens when this fatigue affects not just a few individuals, but ends up dictating the rhythm of an entire society?
Decades of costly decisions
Much as we hate to admit it, Romania is the perfect example of the answer to this question. In less than a century, the country has experienced events that would normally span two or three generations: forced collectivisation, the demolition of historic cities, a revolution whose meaning is still disputed today, transitional capitalism where the rules were written to benefit those who knew what was coming in advance, and a democracy where corruption operated systematically and visibly for long enough to seem the norm, not the exception.
Each of these episodes has required Romanians to make costly moral decisions: cooperate or resist? Denounce or remain silent? Leave or stay? Accept or refuse? And in every case, the price of making the right choice was very real. Historians have documented how tens of thousands of peasants were arrested during the collectivisation process alone for refusing to surrender land, which was treated as a crime. The righteous were punished for every good deed. Conversely, the wrong choice was often rewarded.
Researchers in the field of historical trauma continue to study the psychological and social consequences of this collective experience, having identified transgenerational effects of exposure to systematic repression, including generalised distrust, civic passivity, and difficulties in building public solidarity.
Learned helplessness and the tendency to retreat into one’s own private bubble
What followed this repeated collective experience is known in psychology as “learned helplessness“. Originally developed by Martin Seligman, the concept describes the state in which a person repeatedly exposed to situations where their efforts have no effect comes to believe they have no control. Consequently, they reduce their initiative, persistence, and willingness to act, even when there is a real possibility for change.
The American sociologist Robert Bellah coined the term “privatism” to describe the tendency of individuals to withdraw from the public sphere into increasingly smaller circles—family, close friends, and a trusted group. Bellah’s “privatism” is another form of resource conservation, achieved through the narrowing of ethics. In other words, people do not necessarily become bad, but they become selective about whom they show kindness to.
The signs of this withdrawal are visible in Romania, statistics notwithstanding. Sociological research confirms the paradox that many of us seem to have the capacity to do good only sporadically, while being unable to create lasting collective structures. Remarkable solidarity within the extended family coexists with an almost complete lack of trust in institutions and anonymous citizens. We show generosity towards those we know. Towards the common good, less so. It is as if, with the privatisation of economic institutions, the concept of the common good has also been privatised.
This structure, based on high trust within the inner circle and deep distrust of institutions, is not a character trait, but the predictable result of decades in which institutions were instruments of control rather than protection.
Religion as a steward of shame
This withdrawal into the private sphere did not exclude the church from the equation; on the contrary, it defined its role more clearly. In Romanian villages, for example, the church was present at nearly every defining moment in the life of the community. Therefore, one could argue that society had the resources necessary for moral resilience. And sometimes, Romanians did show resilience.
However, just as often, the local church was a political instrument rather than a vehicle for spiritual transformation. At the grassroots level, unfortunately, it has confined itself to defending the outward forms of goodness without exploring the depths needed to build people’s capacity to be good in the absence of social reward. As the steward of proverbial shame, the church has produced people who know they must be good, but who are, in practice, strangers to this ideal.
This has resulted in a significant loss. Research by Karl Aquino and Americus Reed in the field of moral psychology suggests that people with a strongly internalised moral identity—that is, a moral identity that is embraced as part of who they are, rather than being imposed from the outside—expend less conscious effort to act ethically. They find it easier to do good because they are not engaged in a constant struggle against their own impulses. In other words, doing good comes more naturally to them because it has become part of their identity.
It is evident that a religion that produces people with such an identity builds real social reserves, whereas one that produces only surface-level conformity uses up social reserves until they are depleted. External goodness functions through coercion, and coercion consumes resources.
The Gospel and identity transformation
The Christian Gospel offers a different diagnosis and, consequently, a radically different solution. In theological terms, the distinction is between sanctification and moralism. Moralism demands that a person act in a way that they lack the inner resources to do. Sanctification, on the other hand, describes a process through which resources are restored, not merely activated. Therefore, the difference between the moralised person and the transformed person is that the former will succumb to exhaustion because they are fighting against their own nature alone, while the latter possesses an internalised moral identity, as defined by Baumeister, with the essential difference being that this internalisation is not the product of personal discipline but of a relationship.
In The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, Walter Marshall suggested that moralism is the default setting of human nature, rather than a deviation from the norm. Everyone, including Christians, is inclined to treat obedience as a means of obtaining God’s favour. This is precisely why the Gospel is not a call for more discipline, but rather a restructuring of the relationship between identity and behaviour.
Writing to the community in Rome—a society that knew a thing or two about institutional corruption and moral fatigue—the Apostle Paul called on the believers to undergo a transformation through the renewal of the mind. The verb used by Paul describes a fundamental change of form, not an adjustment of behaviour, because what he has in mind is a person who has become someone else entirely. A reborn person.
Prioritising the indicative over the imperative
Moral change begins with the fundamental distinction between the indicative and the imperative. The indicative describes established reality: who you are, what Christ has done for you, and where you stand in relation to God. The imperative describes what is required of you: how you must live and what is expected of you. Most moral and religious systems, including mainstream Christianity, operate on the basis of the imperative, instructing people to be good, fair, generous, and pure. The requirement precedes and conditions identity: you are accepted if you behave properly.
The Gospel, however, is rooted in a reversed order. In Center Church, Timothy Keller articulates this order, noting that the Gospel first informs a person that they are more sinful than they dared to believe and that their moral performance cannot save them. However, they are also more loved and accepted than they dared to hope. Acceptance does not follow proper behaviour; rather, it comes first and makes it possible. When it appears, the imperative flows from the indicative as a response, not a precondition.
The anthropological consequence of this reversal is precisely what was missing from the context I described earlier. A person who acts ethically in order to gain acceptance—whether divine, social, or institutional—is someone who is struggling against their own nature through their own efforts. Their moral effort comes at a real cost and becomes exhausting under pressure, as Baumeister’s research shows.
Someone whose identity has been formed through unconditional acceptance is motivated by different factors and no longer questions whether they deserve to be good or if their good deeds will be rewarded. They are not focused on the reward because they already feel they are the beneficiary of spiritual abundance. They do not act out of a sense of lack. Moreover, doing good no longer feels like such a sacrifice because it is not a role they play, but rather an expression of their authentic identity.
Reborn people
The shame-based regime that Romania lived under for decades tends to produce one type of person above all others: someone who is adaptable and willing to conform when the cost is bearable, but who is also inclined to circumvent the rules when conformity becomes too expensive. Romanians are not fundamentally worse than others; they have simply learned to survive the system. The system, visible from school to the workplace, was built this way: to reward appearance and penalise depth.
Morality born of love, on the other hand, operates on an entirely different level. Because it springs from a relationship that reshapes a person’s inner self, its resources are not depleted in the same way as those of discipline sustained solely by coercion. However, a person can only learn to live differently if they are loved first, rather than after they have made themselves worthy of love.
This idea is hard to accept when you believe that only what is earned is valuable. However, if this is true, it cannot remain merely an abstract statement. Inevitably, it becomes a personal question.