The standard concept of compassion is that it’s something that people feel. It’s not primarily about action but about a mental state.
People with higher empathy usually feel more compassion.
In general I prefer to have friends with high empathy. At the same time I also prefer friends who are clear about their emotional needs and desire and willing to stand for them.
Basically if Alice is a compassionate human being she has a desire not to cause other people to suffer. She might also have a desire to hear her music at a certain loudness.
I would expect Alice to weigh those two desires and make her decision based on the result.
If I would be in Bob’s place than any advice I give would be targeted in helping Alice to get clear about her desires.
D) People should really work on toughening up and growing a thicker skin, it is actually possible.
Having a society where people don’t cooperate with each other and disassociate their needs isn’t a worthwhile goal. It leads to people defecting and a lot of social problems.
People die in wars and having more compassion reduces the amount of wars fought.
I agree that compassion is a feeling, not a behavior. But it seems that in the modern world, ethical norms have changed. In the past they have been more norms-based, rule-based, today it is more like people are expected to figure out of how each other feel and act in a way to make each other feel good. This is precisely the point of the survey here. A few generations ago, speech was regulated by strict norms of etiquette, and basically people were both expected to talk in a way that conforms to them and also not not feel offended as long as the speech of the other person was within the rules. Today, there are hardly any rules to etiquette, people can call their boss on his first name yet it seems today you are expected to figure out what offends others personally and avoid it.
My point is, that probably we need a new word.
We need a word that roughly means “behavior norms that are not based on rules but on expecting people to be guided by compassion”.
We could try to call it empathiquette, i.e. unlike old etiquette, which had formal rules, it is more about an onus to use empathy in every case.
People should really work on toughening up and growing a thicker skin, it is actually possible.
Having a society where people don’t cooperate with each other and disassociate their needs isn’t a worthwhile goal. It leads to people defecting and a lot of social problems. People die in wars and having more compassion reduces the amount of wars fought.
All true, just not relevant. I do think there is a serious problem of having too thin skins today and it is not directly relevant to compassion. As late as in the 1960′s, in the hippie age, people were listening to Zen Buddhist masters and similar gurus, like Osho, who would telling them you are not helpless with your feelings. You can choose how you feel. You can train your mind to react to events differently. One of the last remnants of this era is a Danish guy called Lama Ole Nydahl, sometimes called “the hippie lama” (because he is both a Tibetan Buddhist lama and an ex-hippie) running around the world and telling everybody there is no such thing as “he made me angry”. The other person merely caused a situation, but it is entirely in the jurisdiction of your own mind if it gets angry over it or not. Needless to say, I find this absolutely great.
At any rate I see on younger people who were not exposed to the hack-your-mind spirit of the hippie era, not even in this second-hand way I was (as I am not even 40), that this self-awareness, this thick skin is missing. Todays 25 years old seem to literally think other people control their emotions, other people can make them angry or sad, and from this grave mistake they make their whole system of ethics, they say making others sad or angry is wrong, that it is basically the responsibility of person A how he made person B feel and not person B’s responsibility to police his own emotions and so on.
This I find incredibly bad and I think it is only tangentially related to compassion. Compassion is giving barefeet people shoes. But this is more about people refusing to wear shoes and instead demanding that the road should not contain any object that can hurt their feet. That is the issue I see here, the assumption that whatever happens to you, whatever others do to you 100% determines your feelings and you have no way and no responsibility over your feelings.
This is the issue. This is not as much as calling for less compassion but calling for a more efficient kind where there is more focus on training people to get tougher and control their emotions and gain some distance from events, rather than basically treating everybody as if they were super fragile.
Distance is Lama Ole’s favorite way to explain it. That something bad happens, like you rush to work and run late and then get into a traffic jam, or someone says something offensive, or stub a toe, and if you don’t have much distance from it, then it will feel like the event grabs your mind and literally makes you feel frustrated, angry or sad. But if you have more distance to events then you can choose how you want to react to it ,how you want to feel about it. This is what we need here. True compassion would be teaching people to have more distance from painful events. The distance is basically the same thing as the outer view discussed on LW. I may stub a toe and feel the pain and feel my neck is turning red in anger, but if my viewpoint, my camera is not something located in my head, but more like three meters away looking at the whole situation from an external viewpoint, then through this distance I can decide how to feel.
Compassion is giving barefeet people shoes. But this is more about people refusing to wear shoes and instead demanding that the road should not contain any object that can hurt their feet.
What about ‘he baited me yesterday and today and likely will tomorrow, even though he can, when it suits him, hold his tongue’? I can work with someone even if I am angry, but that doesn’t change my disposition towards the person.
All true, just not relevant. I do think there is a serious problem of having too thin skins today and it is not directly relevant to compassion. As late as in the 1960′s, in the hippie age, people were listening to Zen Buddhist masters and similar gurus, like Osho, who would telling them you are not helpless with your feelings.
Osho’s right hand did run the biggest bioattack on the US at the time. I don’t want to live in a world where when someone doesn’t like how an election is going to go they try to poison a significant portion of the electorate to keep them at home.
With increased technological capacities, this gets more dangerous.
Todays 25 years old seem to literally think other people control their emotions, other people can make them angry or sad, and from this grave mistake they make their whole system of ethics, they say making others sad or angry is wrong, that it is basically the responsibility of person A how he made person B feel and not person B’s responsibility to police his own emotions and so on.
There are certainly people who hold that position but I’m not one of them.
Osho’s right hand did run the biggest bioattack on the US at the time. I don’t want to live in a world where when someone doesn’t like how an election is going to go they try to poison a significant portion of the electorate to keep them at home.
As far as I know, most other gurus teaching similar principles were not involved with bioterrorism. Do you think there might be a causal relationship between preaching you are not helpless with your feelings and committing bioattacks?
There are certainly people who hold that position but I’m not one of them.
Me either. I wonder if someone’s done a study to see if locus of control (internal vs. external) is a cohort effect due to the culture/spiritual teachings of the ’60s, or simply age-related, so people who were in their 20′s in the 1960′s are now self-possessed and don’t blame others for their feelings, while current 25-year-olds just haven’t had time to learn it (although some may be ahead of the learning curve).
How is this relevant again? It is true that in some cases the spirituality of the era resulted in violent madness another example in Tokyo but quite probably not by these kinds of teachings. There were many kinds.
How does it matter if bioterrorism happens under the watch of a person you look up to for dealing with emotions?
Normal people have inhibitions against committing acts like that. It brings up uncomfortable emotions.
A person who disassociates his emotions doesn’t have the same filters.
It is true that in some cases the spirituality of the era resulted in violent madness another example in Tokyo but quite probably not by these kinds of teachings.
You spoke in favor of Osho and not in favor of Shoko Asahara. That makes Shoko Asahara not related to this discussion but Osho is.
I think we have gone through massive societal progress in not having crazy cults anymore. Not having people like Osho anymore is progress.
We don’t need dark arts emotional disassociation. We have mechanisms like Focusing and Nonviolent Communication that work well.
Are there cases where it makes sense to speak about distance and the far view? Yes. On the other hand having your viewpoint as that of a camera located three meters away isn’t good and it would surprise me if that’s something that a Buddhist teacher like Lama Ole Nydahl recommends as a default state.
The standard concept of compassion is that it’s something that people feel. It’s not primarily about action but about a mental state.
People with higher empathy usually feel more compassion.
In general I prefer to have friends with high empathy. At the same time I also prefer friends who are clear about their emotional needs and desire and willing to stand for them.
Basically if Alice is a compassionate human being she has a desire not to cause other people to suffer. She might also have a desire to hear her music at a certain loudness. I would expect Alice to weigh those two desires and make her decision based on the result.
If I would be in Bob’s place than any advice I give would be targeted in helping Alice to get clear about her desires.
Having a society where people don’t cooperate with each other and disassociate their needs isn’t a worthwhile goal. It leads to people defecting and a lot of social problems. People die in wars and having more compassion reduces the amount of wars fought.
I agree that compassion is a feeling, not a behavior. But it seems that in the modern world, ethical norms have changed. In the past they have been more norms-based, rule-based, today it is more like people are expected to figure out of how each other feel and act in a way to make each other feel good. This is precisely the point of the survey here. A few generations ago, speech was regulated by strict norms of etiquette, and basically people were both expected to talk in a way that conforms to them and also not not feel offended as long as the speech of the other person was within the rules. Today, there are hardly any rules to etiquette, people can call their boss on his first name yet it seems today you are expected to figure out what offends others personally and avoid it.
My point is, that probably we need a new word.
We need a word that roughly means “behavior norms that are not based on rules but on expecting people to be guided by compassion”.
We could try to call it empathiquette, i.e. unlike old etiquette, which had formal rules, it is more about an onus to use empathy in every case.
All true, just not relevant. I do think there is a serious problem of having too thin skins today and it is not directly relevant to compassion. As late as in the 1960′s, in the hippie age, people were listening to Zen Buddhist masters and similar gurus, like Osho, who would telling them you are not helpless with your feelings. You can choose how you feel. You can train your mind to react to events differently. One of the last remnants of this era is a Danish guy called Lama Ole Nydahl, sometimes called “the hippie lama” (because he is both a Tibetan Buddhist lama and an ex-hippie) running around the world and telling everybody there is no such thing as “he made me angry”. The other person merely caused a situation, but it is entirely in the jurisdiction of your own mind if it gets angry over it or not. Needless to say, I find this absolutely great.
At any rate I see on younger people who were not exposed to the hack-your-mind spirit of the hippie era, not even in this second-hand way I was (as I am not even 40), that this self-awareness, this thick skin is missing. Todays 25 years old seem to literally think other people control their emotions, other people can make them angry or sad, and from this grave mistake they make their whole system of ethics, they say making others sad or angry is wrong, that it is basically the responsibility of person A how he made person B feel and not person B’s responsibility to police his own emotions and so on.
This I find incredibly bad and I think it is only tangentially related to compassion. Compassion is giving barefeet people shoes. But this is more about people refusing to wear shoes and instead demanding that the road should not contain any object that can hurt their feet. That is the issue I see here, the assumption that whatever happens to you, whatever others do to you 100% determines your feelings and you have no way and no responsibility over your feelings.
This is the issue. This is not as much as calling for less compassion but calling for a more efficient kind where there is more focus on training people to get tougher and control their emotions and gain some distance from events, rather than basically treating everybody as if they were super fragile.
Distance is Lama Ole’s favorite way to explain it. That something bad happens, like you rush to work and run late and then get into a traffic jam, or someone says something offensive, or stub a toe, and if you don’t have much distance from it, then it will feel like the event grabs your mind and literally makes you feel frustrated, angry or sad. But if you have more distance to events then you can choose how you want to react to it ,how you want to feel about it. This is what we need here. True compassion would be teaching people to have more distance from painful events. The distance is basically the same thing as the outer view discussed on LW. I may stub a toe and feel the pain and feel my neck is turning red in anger, but if my viewpoint, my camera is not something located in my head, but more like three meters away looking at the whole situation from an external viewpoint, then through this distance I can decide how to feel.
Upvoted just for this.
Ditto, I really enjoyed this comment
What about ‘he baited me yesterday and today and likely will tomorrow, even though he can, when it suits him, hold his tongue’? I can work with someone even if I am angry, but that doesn’t change my disposition towards the person.
Osho’s right hand did run the biggest bioattack on the US at the time. I don’t want to live in a world where when someone doesn’t like how an election is going to go they try to poison a significant portion of the electorate to keep them at home.
With increased technological capacities, this gets more dangerous.
There are certainly people who hold that position but I’m not one of them.
As far as I know, most other gurus teaching similar principles were not involved with bioterrorism. Do you think there might be a causal relationship between preaching you are not helpless with your feelings and committing bioattacks?
Me either. I wonder if someone’s done a study to see if locus of control (internal vs. external) is a cohort effect due to the culture/spiritual teachings of the ’60s, or simply age-related, so people who were in their 20′s in the 1960′s are now self-possessed and don’t blame others for their feelings, while current 25-year-olds just haven’t had time to learn it (although some may be ahead of the learning curve).
How is this relevant again? It is true that in some cases the spirituality of the era resulted in violent madness another example in Tokyo but quite probably not by these kinds of teachings. There were many kinds.
How does it matter if bioterrorism happens under the watch of a person you look up to for dealing with emotions? Normal people have inhibitions against committing acts like that. It brings up uncomfortable emotions. A person who disassociates his emotions doesn’t have the same filters.
You spoke in favor of Osho and not in favor of Shoko Asahara. That makes Shoko Asahara not related to this discussion but Osho is.
I think we have gone through massive societal progress in not having crazy cults anymore. Not having people like Osho anymore is progress.
We don’t need dark arts emotional disassociation. We have mechanisms like Focusing and Nonviolent Communication that work well.
Are there cases where it makes sense to speak about distance and the far view? Yes. On the other hand having your viewpoint as that of a camera located three meters away isn’t good and it would surprise me if that’s something that a Buddhist teacher like Lama Ole Nydahl recommends as a default state.