This World Continues to Expose the One Thing Humanity Lacks: Compassion

Existing in a world that turns compassion into controversy is an exhausting trend we could all do without.

It is hard (if not impossible) to be engaged in the real world right now. Log into your favorite social media platform, and the first thing you’re going to see is the gore of war. Children being decapitated. Bodies crushed beneath rubble. Families screaming for god, for help, for anything that can relieve them.

Every country, every corner of the globe, is the center of some horror right now. Famines, floods, wars, pandemics. You name it, humanity brutalizing and being brutalized by the rough hand of nature. As we get pummeled and pummeled again and again by these crises, it’s not hard to see the empathy that is missing in so much of our “humanity”.

We are not a species that lacks creativity, that lacks genius. We don’t lack ambition, vision, or innovation. What humanity lacks, in this moment more than many others, is compassion.

We are a species that loves to hurt one another. We are a people who take glee in the extermination of our enemies. Closer and closer we hurdle toward the sun, and year after year, things remain the same. Can there be a change? Can we make a better tomorrow?

It’s hard to imagine such a future without a major change in society and its use of compassion as a whole.

What Is Compassion? What Is Empathy?

To understand what is lacking in our human societies, you must first understand what compassion is in the first place. It’s not enough to look around at the apathy that lingers everywhere. You cannot understand the absence of something you don’t fully acknowledge in the first place.

Compassion, you see, as a topic has been watered down in our modern world. Much like the word “empathy” it’s come to represent some kind of passive, soppy emotion. In our modern understanding, to be compassionate is to pity someone. But those 2 things aren’t even close to being the same.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, compassion is defined as “concern for the suffering or misfortune of others”. True compassion, according to this definition, is looking up and thinking, “What a shame,” when you see someone having a hard time.

This definition, though, doesn’t give us the full picture of compassion. Nor does it show us the functional difference between compassion and its even more watered-down sister — empathy.

The difference between empathy and compassion

It’s easy to get things mixed up when you put empathy and compassion side by side. What’s the difference? To empathize is to understand someone’s emotions, and to be compassionate is to sympathize with someone else’s emotions. But what is the real difference?

The true difference between empathy and compassion is the quality of action.

See, empathy is not an active state. To empathize with someone is to understand where someone is coming from. You don’t have to act on that understanding, you just have to see (emotionally) how they came to their decisions and behaviors. Compassion is different.

Compassion is where the rubber meets the road in terms of our ability to resonate with and help others. It’s the action part of the quotient.

When you are a compassionate person, you are an active person. Meaning that you see someone’s suffering and you intervene to try and alleviate it. That’s the big difference. Compassion doesn’t stand on knowledge alone, it involves a heightened level of conviction and action. Whereas empathy can sit still and quiet.

Why Is Compassion Such a Controversial Subject? Where Did We Lose Our Way?

So why have compassionate ideas become so controversial in this “brave new world” we’ve built? Why is it that someone saying they believe a child deserves to live in peace has become such a powderkeg of emotional response? Surely, once upon a time, those were truths we acknowledged and believed deep down in our hearts.

No more. Now, making statements like the above will get you a stream of vitriol. It will get you a comment section full of people doing mental gymnastics to justify why children and all manner of other innocent people deserve to be bombed, murdered, mutilated, and burned out of their homes.

When did that happen? Why did that happen? The patterns lay themselves out in front of those who care to look beyond their egos toward the bigger, uglier truth of mankind.

Genetic imperatives

Some people, genetically, lack the empathy required to relate to other human beings on a person-to-person level. We see this in psychopaths, narcissists, Machiavellians, and the full scope of other destructive and anti-social personalities. They are born without the wiring needed to have a true and natural state of understanding for those around them (and even more of them are unwilling to develop those states later in life).

People don’t like to accept genetics and epigenetics, but they are reality.

When you lie down with a psychopath or a narcissist, you risk bringing another psychopath or narcissist (genetically) into the world. You are laying the groundwork for more people devoid of empathy to take the stage. Your children could be born with genetic wiring that makes them more susceptible to cruelty.

This is the reality of where we are standing now.

Generations of cruelty have turned into a world of cold, cruel, and callous people. People who are willing to put themselves above everything. People who take pleasure from being “number one” and subjugating those they feel are “below” beneath them.

There is a genetic reality to what we are seeing in the world now. Conditioning alone isn’t the only piece of the puzzle to consider.

Cultural conditioning

Most people shy away from addressing the obvious. It’s understandable. Being honest about how we became so brutal as a species is both dangerous and huge. People like to be comfortable. They don’t like to look beneath the bed.

Yet that’s what we have to do to change, and acknowledging the many ways cultural conditioning affects our compassion is an important part of that acknowledgment.

There are 4 major ways that we have been conditioned by the powers that be to be more cruel and divided:

Man as God: Using social media as the primary tool of ego-stroking, your average man has been convinced that they are a god unto themselves; above all others and above being questioned or questioning themselves.
Emotional politics: Conflating the real-world issues that affect living human beings as emotional soapboxes that tie into the individual ego and their sense of justice and progress.
State mascots: Awarding citizens who show the most callous, aggressive, and compassion-less behavior. Raising them on platforms to be worshipped, adored, and copied.
Desensitization: The constant replaying of the most gruesome horrors happening in this world slowly desensitizes viewers, normalizes cruelty, and exhausts compassion responses.

When one looks at social media, the most obvious forms of conditioning stick out like a sore thumb.

Raising ourselves as gods, we have been fed a lie. We have been told that our opinions on social media are important. That they “hold weight” and are tied to our value as people. But the truth is that (for the most part) it’s all a lie. A big distraction that convinces people they are more mighty and more important than they are.

It’s easy to lose compassion for other people when you’re logging into a website every day that treats you like the most important, beautiful, and talented person in the room.

Then there’s the emotional politics.

By conflating real-world issues with emotional triggers, they have convinced wide populations to commit themselves entirely to virtue signaling. This thing makes you sad, so it’s evil and you should make sure no one else ever has access to this thing that makes you sad. The ego stands on these emotional issues and makes a great show of its importance and goodness.

Our compassion has been lost too in the creation of state mascots.

Time and time again, the most aggressive, cruel, and callous among us are raised on platforms of power and prestige. They are made into politicians, community leaders, church elders, rock stars, influencers, and more. We lift these traits up and then are confused when generations of people follow suit.

Is there more to this insidious trend? Of course, but these are the 4 big points that are pushing us closer and closer to a future devoid of true connection and compassion.

Little by little, humanity is chipped away, until there is nothing left but this clawing, vicious, consumptive monster who has forgotten what it means to live in a community with their people.

Is There Any Chance of Changing Things?

This is the point in the article when the comments start to fill up with the naysayers. Negative. Pessimist. Nihilist. All of the usual responses you get to point out the obvious things that people don’t want to look at.

Could we change this cruel world we’ve created?

Of course, we could.

We are a species that sends telescopes into the depths of space. We’ve put people on the moon, eradicated entire diseases, and invented entirely new ways of living and being. Humanity has a universe of possibilities within them, eons of greatness being pushed to the side.

Of course, we could create a more compassionate society…if it was important to us.

That’s what we’re looking at right now. Compassion isn’t important to the people it should be most important to. It doesn’t make as much money as cruelty. It doesn’t fund wars or the controversy that makes your favorite celebrities and influencers multi-millionaires.

If compassion had a price tag on it, it would probably be championed in the White House.

If compassion spilled forth from the earth in a torrent of black gold, it would probably be the first thing our parents taught us about.

But it’s not.

Helping others, strictly to help them, isn’t a lucrative game. It doesn’t make people heroes, celebrities, politicians, or religious leaders, or carry them to any other seat of power in this world.

The most powerful people are the most cruel.

They are the ones most willing to lie, most willing to sell their fellow man into the shackles of modern slavery. That is who rules this world, and in a heart that could sell others, there is no compassion. There is no empathy. There is no progress in that heart.

Is there a chance of changing things? Sure. But it requires discomfort. It requires ego death. It requires the destruction of everything we have come to be familiar with.

Could we create a more compassionate society? A world that mobilized itself any time it saw cruelty gathered in masse at the edge of a city border? Of course, we could create that world, but not until we destroy this cool one where oppression, war, and genocide so easily take root.

You are here. You’re on this planet, and you’re a part of this journey whether you want to be or not. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to be a part of the problem? Or are you going to be a part of the solution? Every day is a chance for you to choose.

Be more compassionate in your everyday life. Extend softness to those who need it most (yourself included).

Humans are not made humans by their cruelty. We are made human by our empathy, our ability to connect across differences, and our understand of wider concepts outside of ourselves. You get to be part of that, but not without standing outside of this cruel world we’ve built and demanding better for you, your family, and the future.

I am an author, NLPMP, and podcaster who helps women create their ideal lives after a lifetime of trauma. Join my mailing list for free weekly advice, or click the link below to learn more about me.

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