The pleasures and dangers of compassion
“Tolerance and compassion are active, not passive states, born of the capacity to listen, to observe and to respect others.”
Indira Gandhi
The mechanism described in the previous chapter has another interesting effect. The state of mind of the people you have compassion for gets reflected into your brain. Now what is compassion? As we have seen in the previous chapter, you have a model of every person you meet in your mind. And as soon as the model is good enough so that you can identify yourself with it, you have compassion. As people are fundamentally very similar, this will always happen after interacting with a person for some time. With people from very different cultures it will take longer, but it will also happen sooner or later.
Then their happiness becomes your happiness and their sadness becomes your sadness. This is why it is so rewarding to have compassion: you can feel other peoples joy! The more people you feel compassion for, the more joy from others you will feel. Without compassion we are dead inside and very lonely.
Imagine two persons who give each other a gift. Both will be happy from the unexpected gift. Both reflect the others happiness in their own mind and within the others happiness is again their own happiness. This means both minds will be filled with happiness.
This is why the process of two people giving each other a gift is so much more satisfying than when both of them buy the same item from their own hard earned money in a shop.
It makes therefore sense in a cooperative society to work only for others instead of oneself. It‘s simply more fun. In a cooperative society, people will be sorry for those who never help others.
For the same reason it is traumatizing to hurt others: the pain of the victim gets reflected into the abuser.
But this means that we are able to, if we have compassion, feel also the pain other people experience. This is the reason why other peoples suffering makes us often aggressive: their pain is mirrored in our brain and it disturbs us. We literally feel their pain. This happens especially if we are not able to help the suffering person. We then like to invent reasons to justify their suffering as kind of just punishment („he was stupid“, „she is a terrible person“, „he is not from my group, why should I care“). This helps us to get rid of the pain. But this also kills our compassion as we don’t identify with the person anymore. This is why a society should be organized in a way that it is always possible to help others. And helping should not be delegated to government institutions (i.e. a social system). The process of helping is important for us to be able to develop compassion.
The huge amounts of detailed information (videos etc.) about suffering people which modern media channels provide, have a devastating effect on us: we have no choice than to react with the defense strategy mentioned above: we blame the victims for making us feel bad and lose compassion in the process. This makes us feel numb. This is why we should consume media only very moderately today.
To love means to feel responsible for the loved person. This always induces the fear of not beeing able to protect this person. So we often prefer not to love. This is the single factor which is limiting the amount of compassion present on this planet!
And this is why love is such an extremely scarce resource today: it is extremely difficult to be able to guarantee the wellbeing of a person alone. So we love only a very small number of people (in modern, western societies: our wife or husband, our kids and very few friends).
But I am quite sure that we all would actually prefer to love many more people. And I am also sure that we are capable of loving many people. A cooperative society would allow us to do so. But is not abundant compassion a prerequisite for a cooperative society to form? Yes, and this is why it is not easy to transition to such a state. It requires a majority of people to become aware of this problem and people must become aware of their desire to enjoy unlimited love.