There’s more than meets the eye
A tattoo that I have contemplated over the years is “Compassion is truth” and this is basically an essay on what I think it means to be truly compassionate in one’s living.
Why be compassionate? There are many answers to this, but broadly speaking, it is in some small sense an antidote to the inherent suffering of life. My philosophy of compassion stems from a broad belief in determinism. Although our lived experience is one of “decisions” and “actions” that feel completely and intensely personal, this does not represent the underlying truth. The underlying truth is that everything that has ever happened in the world before we came into it has drastic and massive consequences for our behaviors and actions. We have no control over our parents, over the DNA coding that built everything we are from the ground up. When we start to look at free will from a scientific perspective, we quickly realize that there is no empirical basis for such phenomena. For in a world built on cause and effect, it seems pointless to separate later causes and their effects from the earlier ones. Did the small rocks that started cascading down from the mountain cause the avalanche or was it the large boulders that finally gave way? Or should we blame the tectonic plates that made those mountains in the first place? You can blame whatever part you want, but there is no point at which we can distinguish the chain of casual events.
Once we understand this to a degree, we can accept with no small humility that much of the world is out of our control. We are beings who are frustratingly limited. Stuck in a world with seven billion similarly conscious minds dealing with situations caused by untold generations of human behavior and society, not to even mention the natural world. So take a deep breath, you don’t have to hold on so tight. The world is not your fault and it’s not going anywhere.
Compassion is an antidote to the suffering of the world because through it you can realize how pointless it is to blame things on people. Often times when we make a mistake, our automatic assumption that things could have gone differently. When we fall into a pit, we instantly trace back a casual chain of stupid decisions that led to that unfortunate conclusion. As a survival mechanism, this is a top rate attribute to have because if you hate yourself enough after falling maybe you won’t keep falling in pits. As a happiness and wellbeing mechanism, it doesn’t look so hot, especially when you consider that things couldn’t really have gone any differently. Compassion is the realization that things cannot be anything different than what they are. It is an incredible feat of the mind to project these alternate realities for us, but they are illusory. There is but one path, it is the path that we are walking, we live in the moment, and it is only through each moment that we can change anything. Our future will look like the past if we cannot change our behavior in the moment, and our future will most certainly look like the past if we can’t stop reliving it in the present.
However, compassion is not a one sided emotion. I consider myself to be a victim in some way of parental compassion, and I think a large portion of our generation might identify with this. My mother took care of almost everything for me during my early years and far past the point of it being appropriate. In her mind I know that she thought a child should be free to roam and play unburdened of the concerns of the real world. What she did not anticipate through her kindness was that I too would one day have to interact with the real world, that it would be expect of me to know how to cook, take care of myself, organize my space, and countless other micro routines. My mother, by doing those things for me enabled the inherent laziness of my nature and created a demon that seemed to loathe the maintenance of my being. I wrestle with that demon every day, and it’s hard not to resent her for it. How could she have not seen that she was denying my opportunity to learn? I was a lazy kid, I needed to be pushed not accommodated. This is the burden of privilege and I won’t try and tell you it’s as bad as neglect because clearly it’s not. But you can’t also tell me the pain I feel isn’t real. It’s clear to me that one of things we are dealing with as a society is a generation of kids who had the road paved encountering the world and realizing that it’s nothing like they could have imagined. Mental illness and suicide are on the rise and that’s attributed to many factors and I firmly believe this is one of them.
The human cognition of compassion works in such a way that when we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and look through their eyes, it blinds us to other aspects of their being. Essentially, we can only do that so well. I was enlightened to this in my disabilities course. When able bodied people look at someone in a wheelchair or missing a limb. Our mind immediately leaps to the banal everyday struggles they must encounter in a world made for abled bodied people. We imagine how difficult their life must be and how brave it is that they continue to fight on. I am very unsure with how helpful this all is, because there is something missing when our minds make that compassionate leap. For us, it is the first time seeing the world through the eyes of the differently abled. What are you experiencing is more akin to the first day after becoming disabled. When you look at the world through their eyes, it is the first time you have seen the world this way, but for them; this is the world and they’ve gotten used to it. I think it is fair to say that being disabled is not their biggest concern in the slightest, that is now just they way they are and they way they may have always been. Yet here you are now an awkward fluttering mess, just because you made jumped the empathy gap and are trying to reorientate your perspective of the world to what you naively imagine their’s must be.
What I believe the world is in need of is a developed sense of compassion, because the dangers of a naive sense are all too real. If a developed sense of compassion seems too out there for you, I’d ask you to consider why that is. Why do we have such a difficult time understanding that letting people fail is an essential part of the learning process? Are we truly aware of what goes on in our conscious mind when we bridge the empathy gap? Because there is a very true form of cruelty that masquerades as kindness and showing that for what it truly is is far from simple.
As a species, our “emotional intelligence,” (however the fuck you would like to define that) is shockingly lacking. Some of this can be attributed to personality, but other parts seem to be that we lack sophistication we have around understanding and processing our emotions. In DnD terms, we have prioritized intelligence over wisdom to a great fault. A fault from which we suffer collectively because we are still mysterious to each other in ways that our still surprising. We have a space station circling this planet at ridiculous speeds that we can regularly deliver supplies and operators; but simultaneously as a population we can’t agree to not elect a morally bankrupt psychopath? How is this possible? It is possible because we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know the madness that lies lurking in the depths of our psyche.
Compassion may be truth, but it is far from a simple truth and in its more instinctual form, I think it can be genuinely blinding and devastating. There is compassion in accepting the harshness of the world and truly understanding how much pain is needed in order to create strong people to withstand it. The world certainly needs more of this compassion, but essential to that understanding is that we cannot hide from the monsters in the world, we must make ourselves strong enough to stand up to them, because those monsters aren’t just out there, they are in here too.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” -Omar Bradley