As far as the good people of Amstetten could tell, Joseph F was a devoted grandfather who drove a silver Mercedes and went fishing to relax. He was, a neighbour thought, “a perfect head of the family”. Now that he has confessed to enslaving one of his daughters and three of their incestuously conceived children in a purpose-built dungeon, Mr F finds himself branded with an altogether newer stereotype. He is an Austrian monster. Like Wolfgang Priklopil, the imprisoner of Natascha Kampusch, he embodies an unspeakable deviance that has somehow flourished, this time not for years but decades, a few feet beneath the well-kept streets of one of the world's most ordered and affluent societies.

Austria's own bewildered headlines only strengthen the temptation to label the F affair a symptom of a national illness. “How can it happen here?” (Die Presse). “An entire nation must ask itself what is going so wrong.” (Der Standard.) In certain respects this tragedy is, indeed, local. But its roots will prove complex and its lessons applicable well beyond Austria's borders - chief among them that wherever civilisation is neglected it shrivels and dies.

Amstetten's soul-searching has barely begun. Even so, it is already clear that Ms F's ordeal in her father's cellar might have been far shorter had local officials been more curious about a deeply curious case. Mr F, it emerges, may have had a previous rape conviction. Police could not say yesterday because his file could not be found. Yet, with or without a file, he had been allowed to adopt three babies on the basis of his claim that his daughter had left them on his doorstep. He was also taken at his word on his daughter's sudden and baffling disappearance, aged 19.

For no official to have insisted on a thorough investigation of Mr F's stories at any point in his daughter's 24-year imprisonment represents a serious failure of the state at every level. Police and social workers may cite in their defence the firewalls thrown up by Austria's tough data protection legislation. Such firewalls may help to explain, but they do not excuse: three children have spent their whole lives below ground, their only company each other and their tortured mother.

The sheer horror of the story will require a social reckoning as well as a structural one. Neighbours will testify, but their reactions are already telling. “I'm good friends with Mrs F,” one told The Times yesterday. This neighbour admitted she did not know the Fs' first names. There are, it turns out, heartrending differences between empty rituals and genuine community and between respect for privacy and cold indifference. Those given the task of finding out what truly went wrong in Amstetten will have to ask awkward questions of its people. But they should also look abroad - to Britain, for instance, where Stephen Wills, a cyclist knocked down by one motorist, was left to die by others who swerved to avoid him rather than stopping to help. The human herd seldom shows the same compassion or responsibility as human individuals.

Austrians may now clamour for legislation, but new laws will be less effective in preventing new atrocities than the shock from which Amstetten is now reeling. That shock sends two clear messages. While meddlesome police and social services can pose a risk to families, a complacent state that fails even to offer a reliable safety net poses risks of a different order. More broadly, a community merely going through the motions of human interaction is no community at all.