What are you serving?

Often when we think we're doing good in the world, we're just covertly feeding our egos under the guise of goodness. How can you tell which you're doing in any moment?

Call to mind someone who maybe isn't literally evil, but sure acts like it sometimes. Perhaps there's a CEO who makes self-serving excuses for his company's rotten behavior. Or a politician whose views and policies are so abhorrent that she must be stopped.

Do you believe that it's possible for this person to undergo a catharsis, in which they realize that they've been serving the wrong master (for example, money instead of conscience), repent deeply, and are permanently transformed by it (even a little)? Don't worry if such an event seems unlikely; just think whether it's possible for this person. (If it's not, maybe go back to step one.)

In such a moment of catharsis, doesn't it seem like there's a good person buried deep inside who is probably immensely grateful for at least briefly "seeing the light" and being free of an unhealthy burden? Such a "good person" lies at the core of each of us (though what's going on with sociopaths, don't ask me). But for most of us, it is caked over with a lifetime (or lifetimes) of parasitic sludge that serves neither the host nor others. Yet this facade

When you're interacting with a difficult person, are you talking to their facade? Or are you talking to the inner "good person" about their facade and whatever problems it is causing? In one case you'll probably feel some self-righteousness or smugness for putting a nasty person in their place. In the other, you're more likely to feel love, and trust that your message may get actually past the defense mechanisms that normally deflect such threats. Such messages are genuinely dangerous to the facade, after all.

It is only genuine love that can plant the seeds of transformation deeply enough. This is as true for ourselves as it is to others. Regardless of what actions we take (even if we need to use physical force), it matters what intention it is guided by. Self-righteousness and love may both feel like good intentions in the moment, but the road to hell is only paved with one of them.

The planet and our species are in crisis right now, being assaulted from many fronts. This darkness will persist for as long as we hide ourselves and each other from the light. Fighting other facades has the benefit of making us feel like we're doing something brave important, but only by offering each other an invitation out of darkness can such crises be genuinely solved.

I bow to the light within you. Or, as they say in Sanskrit, namaste.

"Former pharma CEO pleads guilty to bribing doctors to prescribe addictive opioids"

It is easy to read a headline like that and immediately feel disgust. Obviously this person is evil, and if there were only fewer people like that, the world would be a beautiful place, right?

I maintain that this is not just false, but dangerously false. Even after we lock him up (and I agree we should), someone else will fill his shoes, because we have collectively designed a system which encourages the kind of mind he has. The critical question we need to be asking ourselves is: what kinds of conditions could turn me into a person like this?

If your answer is "there are no conditions that could have been applied (to even baby me) that would make me do that," you haven't introspected carefully enough. Nazi Germany was possible because of conditions, not because of inherently evil people.

Until we turn away from the cycle of constant outrage and disgust, and toward understanding the darkness in our own minds, we will never solve this problem.

The Great Mystery

Okay, so once upon a time our ancestors attributed everything to god:

Equivalently, they considered "god" to be the cause of everything:

Today we're smarter than that. We know that things happen for a reason:

Wait, but how does the electromagnetic force work? As the inimitable Richard Feynman explains, we can't really explain it in terms of anything simpler:

This applies to basically everything:

For any statement, you can ask the question "why?", and there are only two possible outcomes:

1. Why?
 a. Because X.
   ii. Why X?
      => Goto 1!
 b. We don't know!

In graphic form:

In other words, ALL the leaf nodes of any "why?" diagram must be "???", because for any other node, we can keep asking "why?" until we cannot get an answer. It is the only base case in this recursion.

Even if we discover a new fundamental force, the situation is the same:

But we can of course invert the diagram as before:

Now, you might object to this inversion: the details of "???" may not be the same in all cases, so why are we treating it as if they were?

Well, we're not saying that the same unnamed thing is responsible for everything we see in the world. We're saying that existence is, at its root, mysterious. No matter how many boxes and arrows we draw, we can always trace them back to the place where we simply don't know. 

Often this sense of mystery is hand-waved away, by explaining that as science makes progress, we'll figure each of these things out. But this misses the point: as each of those things is figured out, they just create more arrows back to "???", not fewer! Far from "closing in on the answer", we're ever-expanding the scope of the great mystery.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” 

"If you try and penetrate with your limited means the secrets of nature, you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious." 

-- Einstein 

‘The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.’ -- Werner Heisenberg

  

"The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute.The good news is there's no ground." -- Chogyam Trungpa (Buddhist master)

If you don't like the word "God," feel free to substitute "???" or "the great mystery." It may not explain anything, but if it tickles your sense of profound awe, it has served a great purpose.

(Relatedly: awe is the emotion most directly linked to compassion.)

TPJ and empathy

Already known:

• The amount to which a person can understand others' intents and beliefs is correlated with how altruistic they are.
• Activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is correlated with the ability to understand others' perspectives.

Confirmed:

The size and activation in the TPJ correlate with altruistic behavior.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-individual-differences-altruism-brain-region.html

If you ARE outraged, you're not paying enough attention

Have you seen this bumper sticker before?

Not only do they get it wrong, they get it completely and utterly wrong. Let's look at the definition of outrage:

Definition of OUTRAGE

1

: an act of violence or brutality

2

a : injury, insult  outrages on silly women or poor passengers — Shakespeare>b : an act that violates accepted standards of behavior or taste  outrage alike against decency and dignity — John Buchan>

3

: the anger and resentment aroused by injury or insult

 

Even assuming they mean definition 3, it's just plain wrong. Resentment? That's never a healthy emotion. There seems to be a popular sense that the only way to make a positive change is to have a fiercely negative emotion driving it.

I've written before about why that's just not true. Here I want to add that the assumption that it is true is probably the cause of many of the problems than the sticker is trying to get us to pay attention to.

Solutions that are arrived at from a place of resentment are inferior to those that come from a desire to improve the world. A true desire to improve the world, not the half-assed kind we kid ourselves into thinking we have when it suits us.

A crazy thought

When we unskillfully try to reduce our own suffering, we turn to entertainment, diversions, distractions. When we do it skillfully we seek our own liberation.

When we unskillfully try to manifest compassion -- to reduce the suffering of others -- we apply bandaids that solve the proximal causes of suffering. Hunger, pain, etc. When we do so skillfully, we try to point others toward their own liberation.

We do require diversions until we are "strong" (or lucid) enough. And helping others in conventional ways is a fantastic and important thing to do.

But perhaps, just perhaps, suffering and compassion are actually blessings in disguise, to help us restore ourselves to our true nature.

This really belongs on my other blog, monktastic.blogspot.com, because of the pontificating. But I'm putting it here because (1) it's an (unconventional) answer to the question "why empathy?", and (2) trying to hide my crazy ideas is just another form of ego clinging. Might as well out myself while I have the courage to do so.

(And, of course, I think this is a useful post, which is the bar I use to decide whether or not to post on either blog.)

Depression: Just Get Over It?

Came across this nice advert (look at me trying to sound all British and fancy) at JFK yesterday:

I think it has a good message, but makes a shaky comparison. At the bottom, it asks "So why do some say that about depression?"

Clearly, one can not just "get over" depression. It's a devastating illness, and it's silly and counterproductive to blame someone for being depressed, or to pretend there's a magic button they can press to turn it off.

On the other hand, there is an important difference between cancer and depression: there exist purely mental (e.g., mindfulness-based) therapies that have a large impact on the latter, but the mind seems to have almost no ability to affect the former (other than with acceptance).

The argument that "the mind is just the brain" (i.e., just a physical device made of neurons and neurotransmitters) doesn't help even if it turns out to be true, because our whole model of moral responsibility is based on the idea that we still have some say in the matter (even if the "we" is physical).

So the message to not blame those with mental disorders is a great one. But it's important not to swing the other way and suggest that we have little or no mental power over own recovery. That can be disempowering in a subtle but powerful way.

(For a stronger argument, just see studies where manipulating a subject's belief in the existence of free will affects how hard they try to accomplish the given task. This should be something even reductive materialists can sink their teeth into.)