What if hurting people doesn't work to make the world a better place?
Generalizing is always dangerous, but I noticed an interesting synergy between the last post and the one before that. I’ve been thinking a lot about caritas and how it applies to politics recently, but haven’t had a chance to dig into that here. But the generalization that tempts me relates to my wish to stop training myself using negative reinforcement. If I’m not going to do that, I need some other mechanism. Otherwise I just fall into “whatever is easy.” And I think this generalizes.
I have an embarrassing confession to make: I spend an inordinate amount of time reading. Not reading serious stuff: reading fanfic. This is something that’s a significant enough time sink to be concerning, but it’s hard to figure out how to address that concern without negative reinforcement. Feeling bad about myself because I’m spending “too much” time reading fanfic isn’t something I’m willing to do, as I mentioned in the previous post.
This is a problem that seems really common amongst people who’ve had some kind of awakening experience: some amount of negativity that was previously working for them is suddenly no longer tolerable. Whatever was making them a functional adult in the world stops happening, because it hurts, and that pain is now evident, and no longer acceptable.
I’ve been struggling for several years with this—I don’t want to use fear of a bad outcome to motivate me. Fear hurts. But it also works. I’ve been trying pretty hard in my job to use positive motivation (someone needs this, isn’t this interesting, wouldn’t it be cool) to motivate myself instead. This works pretty well. Someone needs this is easy—if someone is bugging me about something, I have no trouble motivating myself to help them, as long as I remember that they need me to help them. This one is challenging, though, because lots of people need things from me: more than I can actually serve.
“Isn’t this interesting” is a bit of mental judo. When I get a bug report, there’s a tendency to feel bad about myself. I failed. My software doesn’t work. Ow ow ow. Or, “that person is being mean to me.” Because maybe there isn’t actually a problem, or maybe it’s not with my code.
What’s been working for me recently is simply be interested in the bug report. Yeah, I screwed up, so what. What’s interesting is how it’s happening. It’s a puzzle. This is remarkably effective, and I’m now much less triggered by bug reports, to the point where I wouldn’t say I’m eager for them, but when they show up, “how interesting” is my immediate reaction, rather than “I suck.”
“Wouldn’t it be cool” is another good motivation. I’ve always wanted to be able to hold a conversation in a language other than english. A real conversion, not “give me a scone please”. A while back I found a site online that gets a lot of positive reviews that’s all about methods for learning vocabulary quickly. That’s my big challenge. I know German grammar pretty well, and my accent is very good. Listening comprehension is pretty good too, except that my vocabulary is tiny. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could do something about that?
What’s wrong with reading fanfic is not that it’s inherently bad, but that there are things I’d like to accomplish, and reading too much fanfic gets in the way of accomplishing them. Maybe I should just let go of attachment to accomplishing anything, but I don’t think being a jellyfish is the best use of my limited time alive, even if it’s pleasant to do it some of the time. Rather than using negative reinforcement, I’m presenting myself with a choice: work on my vocabulary, or read fanfic. Working on my vocabulary has the potential to produce a “cool” result, so it’s a real temptation.
I decided to learn Dutch since I’m going to be in the Netherlands in early November. So far I have about a 300 word vocabulary, which isn’t much, but the method seems to be working—I’ve never picked up vocabulary this fast without total immersion, which I haven’t been able to do since I was seven.
What does this have to do with caritas? It’s occurred to me that what I’m trying to do inside of my head is what society could do to become kinder. Right now our society at least in the U.S. is decidedly unkind. We have all kinds of policies that are supposedly in place to help people, but inevitably they wind up being genuinely, sometimes tragically, unkind.
I was writing about abortion policy in a couple of previous posts, and this feels like a classic example. Caritas is not just “love.” Caritas is all-inclusive. Genuine caritas includes everyone. If you want to stop people having abortions, okay, maybe you have “love” or at least compassion for the potential human life, but if you don’t have caritas for the person carrying it, the result of your supposed compassion will be suffering (don’t click on that link if you are easily triggered).
We see this in so many policies. We don’t like to see homeless people. A policy that cares about that wish to not see the unpleasantness of a person living on the street has the cops arrest that person. Viola: nobody living on the streets. We don’t like their shopping carts. Heck, have the cops send them to the dump when they’re arrested. Maybe they have a bicycle. Crush it, to make sure they don’t try to recover it later.
These are real policies, enacted with the goal of “solving the homeless problem,” but because they lack caritas (they care about the Good Citizen not seeing the Bad Citizen, rather than caring about both citizens equally), not only do they fail (it’s just not practical to arrest every homeless person when your public policy creates them at a steady rate), but they cause immense suffering in the process. Caritas would put the suffering first, and try to address that. Importantly, caritas would actually work.
The point is, you hear people talk about how if we had more awakened people, maybe the world would be a better place. Whatevs. What we need is to stop motivating our social activity with hatred. If self-hatred is the wrong way to motivate myself, it’s also the wrong way to motivate society. It may seem like a punitive attitude toward homelessness or teen pregnancy would discourage “bad behavior,” but it just causes suffering. If we want to truly solve these problems, we have to stop fantasizing that if we only hurt people more, they’ll stop doing the things we want them to stop doing.