The Illusion Of Compassion (Featuring new author@kyriacos)

Attention: This post has been written by @kyriacos

21.000 children die everyday from hunger. This is one every 5 seconds. Yet, a large number, a statistic means nothing next to the face of a single child covered in blood and dirt. So why does this child seemingly deserve more attention?

Exploiting A Human Bug

The human mind falls short when it comes to grasping compassion in large numbers. There is a limit, as if we carry a safe switch to avoid imploding emotionally. Great dictators and all sorts of “leaders” know this very well. A death is murder, a tragedy. A Genocide is only a statistic.

The News Media have also exploited this human vulnerability. Imagine listening to breaking news every single hour about the amount of children dying from war, hunger and curable diseases. Doesn’t really stimulate one’s “compassion” does it? Unless we are physically present in a tragic event, our brains are "compassionately handicapped".

Falling Short

It is as if we have a [statistical anesthesia](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/201108/statistical-numbing-why-millions-can-die-and-we-don-t-care) that makes us focus on the individual rather than the problems of the many. This phenomenon is also only for short term events. We will stop caring about ongoing hunger and war but we will pay attention to a tsunami or an attack in an airport. As if this was not enough to constitute the whole thing a meme, compassion is also directly correlated to time and kinship. It has to do more with the preservation of one’s group rather than the generalised sense of emotional telepathy—as many wish to believe. It is up and foremost a survival instict that acts mostly towards presrving our own selfish interests.

Sensationalist speakers, psychologists and sophists like to speak about the “power of compassion” towards one another. Can we really understand the pain of another person? Aren’t we just rewarding ourselves with the illusion of compassion in order to feel better with ourselves? The latter seems to be true if we take a quick glance at the state of the planet.

Reinforcing Mass Delusion

Compassion works better when advertised and actively reinforced. This is the reason politicians, community leaders and other mass manipulators use words like "affection", "love", "understanding", “peace”, “hope” and other rhetorical jargon when they refer to compassion. They hack people’s brain for associating kinship directly to their own persona. Using the abstract nature of the afforementioned words, speakers are able to easily lure their audience into an active emotional manipulation. The brain is a fascinating organ but it can be easily hacked.

Mastering Self Deception

Imagine a westerner that has probably never experienced hunger or being threatened by war, trying to be compassionate for someone that has gone through these traumatic events. Even if one has experienced war and famine, one cannot be compassionate towards someone else who has also fallen victim of the same circumstances. The "compassion experience" for each and every person does not depend on the outcome of an event, but rather on the cumulative effect of the specific individual that goes through it. This is the central argument of why compassion is a filler word, not an actual thing. We are all individuals with a unique perception of the world. We cannot possibly emulate the totality of the experience someone else goes through

We like to build up social capital with our community as much as we like to hold financial capital. Being likeable involves marketing. When one performs a good deed, feeling good about onself is mostly due to the forthcoming advertising of such action to the community. "We should do something against injustice" the so-called humanist exclaims. Whatever that means is enough to bring people together even if the statement is as abstract as a Jackson Pollock painting. People will help but only to get social kudos from each other, investing more on their ideology and less on the individuals being assisted.

Take a look at your top Steemit community leaders/celebrities and you will soon realise that they are indeed mainly using vague, over generalised, inspirational bullshit. People fall for this trickery, because as aforementioned, we cannot compute properly the experience of another being. We are compassionate towards the idea of compassion rather than our fellow human being. If we were really compassionate we would all sell our belongings and help those in need in a snap. We wouldn’t even need to protest in groups since each of us would help individually. We would be rashing on a daily basis through communities to assist the needy as if they were our family. if compassion was really a human trait we would be in pain everytime we saw someone else in pain, regardless of their relatioanship with us.

We have found plenty of shortcuts to be hypocrites with compassion. For example, we upvote those talking about compassion, feed children with facebook likes and just maybe offer 0,1% to a charitable cause . These actions, create the illusion of compassion, alienating us further from reality and the concept we give to the word itself. Our deeds and practices define us. The current "exhibition humanist" can only survive through the mutual hypocrisy of others— hence why charlatans are more acceptable than selfish realists.

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Attention: This post has been written by @kyriacos

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