Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Shop till you drop. In a down economy, merchants and economists are welcoming the excitement around all the consumer activity in the wake of my favorite holiday. I think all that is fine. Stuff gets made, stuff gets sold, people buy stuff, trade stuff, it’s the major engine of our economy and without it, we wouldn’t be able to function as a society.

Then there’s the other part of the story. A man in West Virginia collapses at a Target store and people step over him to get at their Black Friday bargains. He dies. A woman at a Walmart in California pepper-sprays fellow shoppers to clear a path to the Xbox console she wants to buy.

Yes, you have to allow for human frailty or mental illness or whatever. At the same time, these cases point to the challenge a society faces when people don’t feel a human connection to their neighbors and colleagues. If our sense of caring isn’t stronger than our greed or indifference, the simian part of our brain becomes dominant and we do shameful things.

This isn’t a political problem. It’s a human problem.