None of us really know, for sure, how to play this game. Certain things lead to better states than others, but we don’t really know how this world is put together. Embracing this leads to a way of seeing everything everyone does as a result, an outcome, of taking a best guess, or of evading the guessing game entirely.
Intellectuals love to denigrate popular culture, but in the next breath they tell us we should all be miserable. Popular culture is a drug which serves as a tranquilizer. No one who can feel this world clearly can fail to understand why this would attractive. It is most likely the covert attraction of most intellectuals (and no doubt I’m guilty here too) to pop culture which causes them to engage with it at all, much less judge it.
The Kardashians mean nothing. Their lives are superficial and silly. But they are something to focus on. They are a place to direct your attention. And they seem to generate a new train wreck every week, or at least that is the impression I get. Train wrecks are interesting. The misery and death of others is interesting, because even though we know we are all going there, we can take solace that it is not our turn, yet. And perhaps we are practicing.
This form of compassion undercuts everything. It excludes no one. And it need not feel hate for those who judge. It need not feel hate for those who abide by absolute moral codes. Such codes have much to be said for them, whereas the creed of “being nice” is really an American thing made economically possible by our advanced wealth. Niceness evaporates under stress. It is in many respects a lazy morality and little more.
What brings up this line of thought is the movie “The House of Sand and Fog”, which is a tragedy. They come so close to working everything out, and at all points in the movie all people are acting rationally, from their perspective, based on their limited understanding. Nobody sees the whole picture. If any of them could see where it is all going, they would have acted differently, but no one does. No one can. That is how life is. The wise see more, and fools see less, but few of us are wise, and none of our wise can see everything. And in our culture at the moment, as it is expressed by most media (which is certainly divergent even now from a large swathe of America) wisdom is more or less conflated with being nice, and with assuming everything will work out if we just hope hard enough, and ignore or shout down everyone who says anything to the contrary.
Sometimes you do your best and your world falls apart. Sometimes your world falls apart, and you can’t come even close to doing your best. Most of us muddle along, in intermittent bouts of anger, happiness, sadness, confusion and doubt, love, fear, contentment, anxiety, and all the rest.
Compassion means “with-passion”. No one who has not been through the gamut of emotions, both in quality and in amplitude, can really feel this emotion effectively. It is not a quality to cultivate. It is the outcome of understanding yourself, your own feelings, your own life, your own doubt and confusion, fear, pain and grief.
And as I have said–I have posted on this topic repeatedly, since I wrestle with it–what compassion emphatically is NOT is an excuse for establishing a relationship of superiority/inferiority.
It is right and proper for people to reject some forms of pity. That pity says that person is pathetic, that they have fallen below the human norm. You do not feel pity for people who you feel are suffering nobly. You feel admiration.
Few thoughts.