RE: Suffering Judgement.
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I can't say I've ever thought to compare my degree of suffering to that of others. I suppose it's all tied up with this 'check your privilege' stuff you younger folk engage in:) Can't we all just agree that everyone suffers and therefore we should be considerate to all....as long as they're not complete assholes, in the which case we should poke them in the eye?
P.S. You also have a 'do' where you should have a 'to'!
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Also a valid point. That's what compassion is about, right? Even assholes, we must seek to understand.
Oh, compassion. That's a nice word, too. Is it synonym to empathy? Or is there a difference? It didn't even come to my non-native-speaker mind, as it should have.
And yes, that's what I kept thinking about last night. If it's possible to separate judging the person from judging the actions. How much of the action is really the person and how much socialized. And so on, a really nice and deep rabbit hole to go down another day.
I don’t see the value in ranking people on a scale of suffering and assigning compassion accordingly. If we accept that everyone experiences pain in their own way, who are we to decide how much compassion each person deserves?
There is no value in it. At least in empathy. Either you can feel, or you can't. My argument wasn't to assign compassion or empathy according to a scale, I tried to use it as a metaphor to argue that it does not make any sense to measure suffering, that indeed everyone suffers at their own level. And that, the more that we have suffered, the more important empathy becomes - because from the view of the "more suffered", the rest is only complaining about nuisance.
Absolutely correct! It comes from the privilege discussion, at least that's what I think. Which is a valid discussion, I could write a whole post about how that has been perverted from something meaningful to a sledgehammer argument.
And I wish that more people were like you in this matter, which is what I describe as the truly empathetic here. "Doesn't matter the 'quality' of the suffering, I'm with you."
As for the complete douches, I kept thinking about that last night. Haven't really figured it out yet, as that is a judgement, too. But maybe there's a difference between judging the actions of someone and judging their self. But I'll have to keep thinking to come up with a theory.
I'm not convinced you can separate a man from his actions. Do actions not offer a window into the true substance of a person’s character? Is it not our choices, our everyday habits, and the impact we have on others that reveal who we really are, regardless of where we sit on the privilege and suffering scales?
"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become". (Carl Jung)
Absolutely, but aren't those choices, habits and actions a result of all the things that weren't our choices? Genes, upbringing? What if we never got the chance to even want to break out and become selves in the sense of responsible for ourselves, if we never even learned that? If we never get the chance to choose because we don't know how to?
That doesn't mean that everyone is a saint. Actions matter. I will first help those that I can, and last those who I deem enforcers of what I define as evil. That is, indeed, a whole different and equally fascinating subject.