09 - Compassion

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

― Plato

The idea of practising compassion is not exactly a radical proposition, it’s a foundational concept for most religions and all worthwhile philosophies. But it seems to bear repeating since it appears to be a suggestion more often honoured in the breach - Frequently on an interpersonal level but certainly on an institutional level. Institutions don’t do compassion very well, since by and large, institutions need to manage large numbers of individuals and the least worst for the most, being the best compromise most institutions can make with those variables. Compassion is an individual phenomenon. You cannot have compassion for a group since that is a meaningless construct. You can only have compassion for the individuals in that group. You can take compassionate action to serve those individuals collectively. But neither the action nor the result has compassion, though they may well serve it.

Institutions take their lead from the elites who run or rule them. Institutions don’t serve compassion because their elites, generally speaking, don’t appear to place much stock in it. If you want to count yourself among their number, then you will encounter little enough to encourage it. This is not to say that members of the elite do not or cannot have compassion, it’s just that what is required to become or remain a member of an elite, usually involves sacrificing the more emotionally vulnerable or open aspects of your personality – It might be sacrificed for the best reasons, or so we might tell ourselves. But to serve the imperatives of the institution, elites must ignore compassion. In fact, it becomes quite a difficult proposition to explain to someone who operates in that arena, why there might be any advantage in being compassionate at all. For the most part, compassion seems to put us at a considerable disadvantage. That is how we have organised this world. And it makes sense when we contemplate the difficulties in organising collective activity in the face of the fragmented nature of interest groups and the power they may wield. But that it makes sense in this context does not mean it was or is the only way to go.

The scarcity of compassion doesn’t necessarily imply cruelty or indifference. But it does imply that the compassionate imperative is considered of relatively slight importance and appears some distance down the priority list. The indifferent actor might produce results that are identical to that of the compassionate person but the difference lies in the quality of experience of the actor. And the long term sustainability of that action. Compassion arises from a sense of fellow feeling, of empathy. The capacity to experience a felt sense of another’s suffering or joy internally. Taking the imagined experience of the other and feeling sympathy for them as though the event were happening to me. Having a sense of the others predicament and permitting or encouraging this sense to change my perspective on or behaviour in, the situation.

The empathic person walks a fine line. There is an abundance of situations that might inspire empathy but we have to be able to discriminate effectively - to attempt to hit every target that pops up would mean that I would run out of arrows pretty quickly. Too much empathy would be utterly debilitating. But the absence of it results in little more than an ever narrowing corridor of experience. It requires imagination, engagement and a certain enlightened self-interest to feel empathy. Empathy exposes us to suffering but it also potentially exposes us to joy because empathy opens us up to a wider range of experiences. Without empathy I am left with a shell of drives and perhaps even logical motivations for doing what might objectively be termed as right or sane in a social context - or one that, for the same imperatives, might also tilt against that. Where compassion truly excels is in liberating us from the fragile shell of the self.

Everything in history and experience tells us that human life is bounded by its joys and pains. By suffering and the search for transcendence. Compassion is the key to life’s rich pageant. And those of us, who are strangers to it, are to be pitied. I may suffer from (or enjoy) some neurological disorder than renders compassion bordering on impossible. It may be owing to an absence of empathy or indeed it might well be an excess of empathy or a highly tuned sense of it. The end result being the important thing and if my setup precludes me using or experiencing empathy effectively, then it’s all the same whether I have too little or too much. I might therefore find myself perplexed as to what possible reason you might want to recommend such an onerous experience as compassionate action or to cultivate empathic experience. And indeed it would be difficult enough to explain, because by all accounts the advantages of compassion are qualitative, experiential and difficult to demonstrate. And the disadvantages are – well it can prove an impediment to the freedom to do what I like whenever I like, to whoever I like, and to suffer no personal ill effects from my actions. It might even compel me to put myself in danger or it might cost me some valuable resource, like time or money.

It seems self evident that in a great many cases, especially when considering the actions of the elite, that compassion and empathic action are singularly unprofitable. Weak minded imperatives that get in the way of us doing what needs to be done. Good only for hippies and the useless. The brutal truth faced full on is the only honest way to proceed. (Of course, the brutal truth they contemplate is rarely their brutal truth or one they’ll have to suffer). To such deep thinkers, that which cannot be shown, pointed to, named and its effects demonstrated immediately, cannot be said to be realistic. Which is reasonable enough, from a certain point of view, albeit a little on the limited side. Since their point of view depends entirely on their subjective experience and subjective experience is, well... subjective.

If you live in the present and pursue a future without compassion, and if you don’t suffer from some mitigating condition, then it is quite likely that you are a self-important, self-centred, tosser. If you don't like the term tosser, then you can also use the following valid replacements - a nipplehead, a janglesponnet, a pebble throated urine gurgler and a sausage eating panda fiddler. You can use a mental search and replace. But the word tosser has a pleasing brevity and so it serves my purposes.

A tosser could be defined as one who wilfully manifests characteristics antithetical to the common good. Someone who couldn’t give a tossabout the wellbeing of others would be a prime candidate. I may well have to act against the wellbeing of others at various times in my life, but I couldat least have the good graces to give a toss. Why? Because it means I have given some thought to them and to their predicament. That if I had tomake a choice that they might consider harmful to their interests and point of view, then at least I did the research and their subsequent misfortunewasn’t at the whim of some careless tosser who made a few abstract calculations and then adjusted them to serve the consequences that would best serve his ends.

And why does it matter if compassion is part of the equation or not? To those receiving the consequences, it probably doesn’t - since the act hasthe misfortunate consequences for them no matter what my motivation. And the misfortune itself is ultimately what matters to them. But how I actand how I approach my decisions and the actions that arise from them determines what I become as a consequence of them – Callous action andexperience generates little bar more capacity for callous and careless actions. It's a bad habit. And one utterly without compassion.

However, if it means I’m free to do what I please without undue concern, then why not just be a tosser? What difference does it really make? Well it's my belief that being a tosser is likely to make both me and those that come into contact with me, unhappy. If making yourself and othersunhappy is the kind of thing that gives you pleasure, than you are a tosser. Stop being a tosser.

Sadists are tossers. The sadistic impulse exists in most humans from time to time. When we imagine deriving pleasure from anyone’s suffering then we are yielding to the sadistic impulse. If you have designated someone as an enemy or as evil and you enjoy the idea of them receiving their come-uppance, then you are yielding to the sadistic. It exists on a spectrum – from idle imagining to the direct suffering and humiliation imposed on another human being, by for example, a prison guard who entered that career to enjoy such opportunities. And it doesn’t always appear wrong. Someone imagining the painful death of a noted enemy of the people who’s evil acts inspire a devoted hatred – appears justified and almost right. But it is sadistic. Pleasure in someone else’s suffering is by definition sadistic, no matter how justified it might seem. Sadism, by its nature, obscures compassion – I am talking now specifically about sadism as a neurological attribute, as opposed to a sexual orientation. A sexual sadist might well have a compassionate and loving relationship because their sadism more often exists only in context and as a part of a mutually agreed compact between consenting adults. A sadist who enjoys others suffering most especially when there is no consent, will not tend to easily experience compassion. That person then is limited to enjoying the fruits of a certain narrow impulse indulgence and reward cycle. That is the only charge they want or need. The more holistic and deeper and more subtle and nourishing and enjoyable experience of compassionate action becomes more problematic. That is its own punishment. If you happen to be a sadist, there is little that can be done other than you working to act and be other than sadistic.

Humans are social animals. It is one of, if not the, primary characteristic of the species. Humans grow and evolve as individuals from a vast soup of social information. Everything we measurably are, in a conscious and cultural context, is derived from how we develop socially. We develop language socially. We come to understand ourselves in relationship to our particular social context. We evolve as beings, in both the positive and negative sense, in the friction of social interaction. We are hugely dependant on the particular flavour of the human collective in which we find ourselves.

The social contract is relatively comprehensible to most of us. My culture will likely have given me a sufficient sense of the common good for me to be able to accurately discern the quality of my actions, so I more likely than not have some idea of what is acceptable human behaviour in a given context. My culture may or may not have explained this adequately to me but as a species we fundamentally understand the golden rule of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”. The greater bulk of us understand the value of this compact intrinsically. We understand that contravening it has consequences. We may wilfully ignore it, or we may attempt to forget it. But it is woven into our core by the social engagements and contexts we arise from and our continuing experience of wellbeing depends on our fidelity to it. We understand that promoting it, serves to improve our odds of social co-operation being the norm. Thus we too are more likely to be better treated.

This understanding also determines the price that is likely to be paid for wilfully ignoring it. The shape of our experience is determined largely bythe events we experience, the instruction we are given about how to handle them and our reactions to those instructions and the events themselves,both internal and external. What we know ourselves to be, determines our experience of ourselves. That subjective experience precedes all contact with external stimuli. So if I fundamentally don't like myself, no amount of chemical embibement or sexual adventures or whatever form of distraction I'm into, will resolve my discomfort. It can shift that discomfort from my awareness into a temporary storage unit in my head for a spell. But it will eventually return once the sway of the distracting influence has passed.

What are the pleasures of robbers, perverts, parricides, and tyrants?

- Marcus Aurelius

When I fly against the social contract, I am automatically setting up a certain kind of internal conflict. This is inescapable for most humans. As is the consequences of ignoring its instructions in the hope that it will just go away. An activity a great many humans will likely be intimately familiar with. Such an attempt to shift attention away from what cannot easily be ignored, can accentuate our discomfort and it can make it ultimately overwhelming, resulting in the potential deadening of experience which occurs when too much emotional context is experienced for me to comfortably process, and the result is a somewhat paradoxical flattening of experience so that it seems I feel nothing at all. This is a pitiful waste of a perfectly serviceable experience engine. Rational contemplation of this leads us to an inescapable conclusion; we are best served by contributing to thewellbeing of this social milieu. Being a tosser runs directly counter to that imperative. Therefore it is stupid.

If I am a murderer, then I know myself to be that thing. And that knowledge is likely to permeate my experience. If I steal from another, I know I am doing it and I know it is wrong for me to do this thing. I might steal your goods and sell them and buy heroin and shoot up in a ditch somewhere and never cast a second thought backwards. I might chuckle to myself in pleasure at the thought of the look on your face when you returned and found the bracelet bequeathed you by your mother vanished in a puff of smack. I might high five my pals at the excellent score we just made. But think about the whole context, who would ever choose to be that person? If you took that person as a child and showed them what they would become and how they would behave and treat others, do you think they’d likely jump with joy at the thought? One spin of the wheel. This is it and you are experiencing this? Who would choose that?

This might well be the best rationale for adhering to the social contract. I am this kind if animal, my being has developed in the context of these kinds of social constructs. If I contravene this understanding without sufficient reason, then I am fundamentally undermining my own understanding of myself and experience of being that self. In other words, acknowledging what is best for my own long term well being, also serves a social purpose and helps me to avoid unnecessary conflict within myself. Why waste the short spell I have on this planet contributing to my own sense of unease and psychic discomfort? Why indeed? I’ll let you know the answer if I ever manage to stop doing it.

Of course, these unpleasant personal consequences are neither absolute nor consistent. It changes from person to person and depends entirelyon the circumstances of that individual’s upbringing, internal configuration and experience. If I suffer from some neurological disorder that negates my capacity for compassion, such as psychopathy, sociopathy or being a traffic attendant, then might find myself perfectly content with wilfully ignoring the needs and well being of others. In such cases - compassion, fellow feeling or the social imperative might have little meaning. In that case I am an anomaly. This is a biologically, as opposed to culturally, ordained exemption. Part of me is missing, and I cannot experience the full delights of life’s rich tapestry. The psychosocial consequences of malfeasance become irrelevant to me, because it largely depends on typical functioning. Typical functioning refers to a broadly similar set of social characteristics the greater bulk of us share and can take advantage of.

If I live in a culture that actively chastises those who break its rules and moreover, one which promotes a considerable social cost to suchchastisement, then the abject terror of the social (and therefore personal) consequences will serve to keep the greater bulk of the populace in line.This kind of social control holds firm only insofar as the fear of that consequence holds. If the situation changes or I lose my fear of being caught then the social consequences are no longer relevant. For example, a convicted thief, in a culture that holds thieves in utter contempt, will not worry aboutthe social cost of further conviction. That horse has already bolted. So this kind of justice only applies to those who subscribe to the particular value set it espouses, and therefore have something to lose. For example those with a certain position in that society, or who view themselves as having acertain position or indeed those whose view of themselves depends on their social position, or who aspire to a certain position – They are more likelyto obey the social contract from understandably self-serving reasons. But what of those who are perhaps too poor to understand even the context within which such a notion might have meaning? The imperative of a hungry belly, or indeed a stimulation starved mind, profoundly dwarfs the idea of what other people might think of you. Or if the context is understood, then those who are denied access to that kind of opportunity are likely to utterly reject it as contemptible. What meaning would such social sanctions have to them? So the possibility of social consequence and stigma is a highly conditional one and as such, not a particularly dependable mechanism.

Also, aside from the punitive context, those who are brought up in grinding poverty, who observe those who are better off than they could even imagine, swanning around as if the world was their handkerchief, demonstrating nothing like even the vaguest thought for the wellbeing of their fellow humans, might well experience and indeed be justified in feeling hatred and envy for those preening ignorami. Such a response is entirely in keeping with and appropriate to the world they are observing. Hatred, spite and envy seem to be encouraged. Participating in such an emotional context might seem to serve as excellent armour for those who seek to get on in the world. Such people, habituated to being on the outside of what that culture appears to deem valuable, might well take pleasure in the infliction of some measurable suffering on others who subscribe utterly to that cultures (to them) debased value system. The notion of the golden rule and other similar ideas might seem laughable.

Persistent negative feelings towards others or circumstances or fate or the Gods or whatever abstract notion I might fashion into a bucket to contain my pain, are precisely what should be avoided in life - because such negative egocentric psychological constructs as hate and envy, are not particularly pleasant experiences to be having. They might be satisfying to some wounded part of the psyche, I might feel a certain kind of pleasure in experiencing them, but it is really only a partial appeasement of the compartmentalised brain. The whole being cannot participate in such feelings, just the hurt, angry and vengeful parts of the brain. And if they dominate my experience then I might be able to call the feeding of them pleasurable, simply because those parts of the personality feel pleasure in being ratified. But that's just another string of symbols I have thrown together to make some kind of sense of what is a truly perplexing bind, while I am in the powerful subjective grip of a negative ouroborus. And while I hate, hate is my experience. A profound waste of time and energy.

But it would be a difficult sell to urge those who have little in the way of material wealth and less hope of acquiring any, to favour compassionover hate. Especially since they came into being and developed psychologically and culturally in the same context as those who comparatively, seem to have so much. They experience perhaps a different facet of experience but the same tropes of the culture are shared (though understood differently) by both sides of the equation. The injustice of the experience and the varying range of possibilities open to both is a lot more acutely felt by those whohave a lot less. Being brought up in a culture that encourages the accumulation of wealth signifiers and other trinkets, a culture that equates thepossession of fine things to intrinsic personal value, does nothing to encourage reason and compassion in the relationships between the different levelsof the social strata. If I experience hate and envy and cultural rage towards those who have more of what I think I need to be happy, then it is likelythat is because I was taught what is valuable by that culture and subsequently denied access to it. And this while being persistently reminded of this state of affairs by every source of cultural information prominent in my milieu. Small wonder then.

But if I utterly reject the prevailing notions of what is worth valuing, then that experience of hate and envy and social rage becomesmeaningless, since the context that gave it value no longer exists for me. And if I encourage my mind to observe the truth of that particular cultural trap and the meaninglessness of comparison, and the reality of what is before my nose, and the best means to enjoy experiencing whatever that is, then my being becomes free of the poisonous influence. And in this freedom, if I then encourage compassionate feelings for the other humans that walk the planet, rich or poor, who might not share this understanding, my world becomes a far more pleasant one to inhabit. By stepping outside of my own particular subjective shell to experience empathy for others or simply to approach life in a kinder fashion, to enjoy the notion that perhaps I might make others experience at least no worse, if not a little better through encountering me, is certainly something worth working towards. Not least because it is nourishing to the whole being to know yourself to be someone who at least genuinely tries to do as little harm as possible in this world. A giver of toss as opposed to a taker.

Everything isn’t daisies and roses in this world nor will it ever be. But aside from the rotten luck of extreme and unchangeable circumstances, (for example someone sitting on a doorstep in Hiroshima in the year 1945), the contents of my head and nature of my feelings and experiences about myself and others are largely under my control. To take one of the most common first world sources of existential discomfort - if I feel rage, for example, at the idiot dithering at the cash machine, tapping my foot and gritting my teeth - or someone is having an elderly moment, paused betweenjunctions and I repeatedly beep my horn, bellowing obscenities, all red faced and attractive because of the delay they’re causing me, what kind of service am I doing my own inner landscape? I might be satisfying the needs of most superficial aspect of my consciousness. But the sheer needlessrudeness of my actions might well ruin someone’s day. It certainly can do nothing for my own mood.

Modern life is replete with opportunities for impatience and rudeness and a great many people have no trouble at all in taking thoseopportunities. But in taking them, they only act to increase their own potential for impatience and the discomfort of their own experience. When we act on a thing, in the absence of a counterbalancing motion, we serve to prime our own tendencies to further similar actions. In this way irrationalirritation and overreaction become normalised. If we act on these internal impulses, then that action is likely to become habitual. When we beep the horn at the person having their senile moment, we don’t do anything for their composure. Or for our own patience - What we do manage to achieve is the sharing of our own bile and irritation. Whereas if you restrain those impulses and engage with a sense of compassion for the other, you effectivelyinhibit anger and tension. You manage your own emotions with a sense of proportion and perspective. You make a choice about what kind of consciousness you are likely to experience and this choice feeds into the rest of your day. You set up a productive and nourishing behaviour pattern. And that act of compassion (for yourself as well as the other) leads to a quantifiable improvement in your own inner experience of that moment.

In the queue for the ATM, instead of muttering to yourself, “get a move on you idiot”, you might acknowledge the possibility that you don’t have the first idea of what’s going on in that person’s life. They could have just lost a parent for all you know, or have been diagnosed with some life threatening illness. And your irritation might serve to do what for them and what for yourself? The few minutes you might have to wait are a triflinginconvenience, and what’s the big deal about a few minutes anywise? In this culture we tend to expect absolutely everything and we expect it twominutes ago. What the rush? The cancer cure you’re working on will wait a few turns of the clock. At the junction, you pause and wait for the elderlyperson to get their act together, or offer them some help or ruminate on a time when you were also having a less than Mensa level moment andmessing up the smooth trafficular experience of others. You imagine yourself having the negative experience, you might like someone to help you out if you so needed or at least not make things worse, therefore through actively helping the person or even refraining from acting, you are serving your own self-interest. By choosing to (not) act in this way you are encouraging a sense of fellow feeling through actively not propagating ill will in the worldand developing your capacity for perspective and patience.

And as stated, there is considerable self-interest in this, since you are engaged in improving the quality of your own subjective experience because you are creating a more pleasing environment for it. It is better by far to be one who helps than one who ignores. The kind person is alwayslooking after their own inner landscape. Compassion, in the best application of game theory, is probably most honest if it arises out of some interpretation of self-interest. I would say that all manifestations of human consciousness arise to some degree out of self-interest. It just depends on what that self constitutes at that time and what that self considers valuable.

I would estimate, judging by my experience of humanity, that these claims I make are true for a great many people. But I can only state with any certainty that they are often true for me. I have found that the way to ease my experience and minimize the negative interior friction, is to avoid conflict with what I know most deeply to be true. If I must do something that contravenes this, then I must have a good enough reason, and this reason must be authentic and not some concoction to rationalise me doing what I want in the face of what I know to be right.

All murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers, and to the sound of trumpets

- Voltaire

But when I also contemplate, for example, the image of a soldier with a handgun, standing over a supine line of “enemies”, bound and blindfolded, with a dead man visible behind him and those ahead of him also certain to be dead soon, I wonder about the accuracy of my calculation. I do have a kind of optimistic view, in that I at least view humanity as having the possibility of transcendent excellence. But nonetheless, this is a scene that has played out too frequently throughout human history and it stands to reason that he might well go home and eat his dinner and kiss his children and never cast a second thought back to what he has actually done that day.

My best guess is that these situations are extreme and I cannot tell how dead he is inside, or what the actual cost for him is, each time he pulls the trigger. It could be that it works as I am suggesting and he pays a terrible price for what he has done. But I think that is unlikely. I think when the rules are contravened so extravagantly, and in what becomes a socially ratified context, then the rules themselves change and the nature of our experience of them also changes. It must do, otherwise we could not continue to persist with the weight on our conscience. And one thing that is abundantly clear is that the human being is an extremely resilient creature in this regard.

Under typical human circumstances, I pay a price for the contravention of what I know to be just. To minimise the psychological overhead on me, it is a good idea to avoid coming into conflict with it. Where possible, all things being equal, I should choose my battles wisely, make my concerns frugal, attempt to see the other side of any equation and respond where possible with compassionate intentions, striving always to consider and minimise the possible damage that can ensue from my actions. This is what Buddhists call, “skilfulness of action”.

If we all looked after our own wellbeing with a little more perspective and long term thinking then there would be a lot more helpers in theworld, propagating fellow feeling. And the fact is, there are a lot, a great many people have that experience in their day to day lives. But there doesseem to be a fair amount of short sighted ignorami out there as well. The narrowest view of self-interest is represented by the simple gratification of the moment to moment desires without reference to their wider cost or context. Feeding the momentary impulse means their experience is stitched together with acts of self-satisfaction that once salved, only inspire the next and the next in a never ending cycle of less than optimal itch scratching. And while the scratching of the itch itself might well be pleasurable, the most consistent feeling is that of the itch needing to be scratched. We arealways struggling to balm these mental impulses that are erroneously raised to the status of needs in our internal hierarchy. But if I satisfy those needs and desires that do not directly and unacceptably conflict with the wellbeing of others, without making their satisfaction the most importantfocus of my attention, if I balance these with consideration for the needs and desires of others, tempering where necessary my actions in search ofthose satisfactions, then I train myself to view the world not as an isolated set of needs and impulses, but as a relating and related being. This is justthe first step in compassionate action, but it is also, in and of itself, enough to significantly improve my perception and experience of the world.

We are social beings and the healthier our connection to society is, the healthier we are as individuals. When we emphasise the consideration ofthe greater good over our own moment to moment wants, we resolve a greater emotional need for connection because through that action we areactively engaging with the world in a way that the simple indulgence of urge satiations and the egotistical desire propagation that arises from that single minded activity almost forbids. In this way we unlock the door of our own prison.