Compassion

I’ve heard it said that it takes effort to hate, that it is difficult to hate someone.

I must disagree.

Hate is easy. It is easy to default to anger and rage and to foam at the mouth as you shout at those who wrong you. To long for the days when they will writhe on their deathbeds. But compassion…

Compassion is hard. It is hard to look at those who wrong you, who scorn you and to understand why?

It is hard to understand why

Why do they hate us?

Why do they fear us?

Why do they mock us?

But we mock them. We scorn them. We do not seek to understand, we seek to push ourselves into our corners.

We return to our own tribes, not talking to others. Not talking or discussing problems with others. We do not want to be compassionate to the views of those we do not adhere to. We want our way. Disagreement is death.

And why should that be?

My generation that I have come to know is one that does not allow for disagreements. It allows for one way with all others being wrong, sickly and false.

This mindset will do nothing but hurt ourselves. We will suffer from our arrogance, from our unwillingness to listen.

There are two psychological principles which should be kept in mind when going through life.

Confirmation bias: The tendency to interpret and acknowledge new evidence as confirmation of ones’ belief and discounting evidence which disagrees with our worldview.

It takes seven pieces of positive information to outweigh one piece of negative information. Because of this, we will always view things which are negative more importantly than things which are positive.

Compassion is much harder for us to do as a species but we must attempt to view things with kindness and openness. We must discuss things with people different than us. We must refute tribalism and recognize when our ‘groups’ do things which are damaging. We must acknowledge that those different from us have reasons for what they do and what they believe.

To deny them this or to break it down into a personal attack is to deny that they may have points worth listening to. It denies them their Rights.

It denies them compassion.