"In Order To Have Compassion, You Have To Spend Time Getting To Know Monsters"

(Alan: I cannot source this quote with confidence.)

Thank you Arthur,

I did not know the story about Flannery O'Connor, nor did I realize she wrestled with internalized racism much of her life.

I was also struck by Adler's line: “In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story.”

But it is so hard to listen "long enough" to have any realistic hope that the profoundly deranged people who abound on this side of the border will have a change of heart.

Yes, metanoia happens from time to time, but there may be better ways to spend one's time than spreading oneself too thin. 

I have tried long and hard to hear a Trumpista woman whom I've known for 30 years and all she can do is cling to her core belief (which keeps the foundation of her conservative Christianity intact) that "liberals are baby killers."

Trump's white Christian Base is founded on that cornerstone and it justifies our summary dismissal in every other domain. 

Even when I point out matters of irrefutable fact, she perseveres in repeating the same lie.

Case in point... 

Democrats are the racist party and the Party of Lincoln is the party that has always championed black dignity and black advancement.

In response to K's continual assertion of this non-contextualized, non-developmental, fundamentally untrue history of U.S. partisan politics, I have sent her the following link a dozen times. 

The History Of "How Democrats And Republicans Switched Beliefs" 

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-did-democratic-and-republican.html

It has no impact whatsoever. 

The very next time she has opportunity to mislead, she springs into action. 

And this is a smart woman - with a host of blood children and adopted children - a woman whose kids include doctors and engineers. 

In the last six months she has stopped communicating - apparently not just with me, but with others as well.

Although it's speculative, I venture that I (and others) became too much of a threat to her closed mind, so she decided to close it even more. 

All of us are heavily invested in our identities. I have long held that the thought of losing one's political or religious identity is (for many people) worse than the prospect of physical death. 

Losing political or religious identity is very much like dementia's erosion of personal identity until there are no shared memories -- no shared basis for developing a relationship -- because the roots of self-reflective identity have vanished. 

I realize -- and admire -- that you are a champion of optimism, hope and transformation.

And so it does not sit well with me to burden you with thoughts whose overall "drift" is that many people -- perhaps most -- are more determined to hear themselves in hermetically-sealed isolation than to engage any kind of meaningful, developmental dialogue.

Keep up the good work my friend!

In the cosmic scheme of things, our current turmoil is a blip on the radar.

Pax

Alan

PS Do you know Mozart's quotation about death:

PPS If I have not sent you the following links about George Lakoff's work on upbringing and political identity (and assuming you don't know Lakoff's work from other sources) his insight can provide a breathtaking new view of "what's going on."

Short Form:

How The Values Of "Strict Father" -- Or "Nurturant Parent" -- Control Our Political Views

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/06/how-values-of-strict-father-or.html

Long Form:

"Strict Father" And "Nurturant Parent": The Two World Views That Determine Our Political Values

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/06/strict-father-and-nurturant-parent-two.html

On Fri, Feb 7, 2020 at 5:11 PM AC wrote:

Hello Family and Friends!

The recent reports of political strife in the United States remind me of that same old question: Where do we want to go?  What kind of world do we want for our great-grandchildren and theirs?  If we don’t look where we are going, we’re liable to wind up in a place we don’t want to be. 

As luck would have it, our topic for last Wednesday’s dialogue was (essentially) managing stressful relationships with other human beings.  As masters of this art, we can change our own lives and the course of history.

Here are some of the good quotes we used to get the discussion started and (below this message) a chapter synopsis I had circulated to the dialogue network.

Good Quotes on Marriage

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” – Socrates

“An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.” – Agatha Christie

“The great marriages are partnerships. It can’t be a great marriage without being a partnership.” – Helen Mirren

“My husband has made me laugh. Wiped my tears. Hugged me tight. Watched me succeed. Seen me fail. Kept me strong. My husband is a promise that I will have a friend forever.” – Unknown

Good Quotes on Other Relationships and Encounters

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  - Maya Angelou

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”  - Ernest Hemingway 

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”  - Dale Carnegie

“In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story.”
― Shannon L. Alder 

“People who have strong likes and dislikes find life very difficult; they are as rigid as if they had only one bone.”  -Eknath Easwaran

“We all need each other.  This type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to the maturity of individual and group functioning.”  - Kurt Lewin

All the Best,

Arthur

 Book Chapter: (Robert Greene) The Laws of Human Nature (2018), Chapter 18 

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), author of some of the most unforgettable short stories I’ve ever read, had to deal with more than her share of stressful relationships and encounters with human beings.  One of the reasons for her extraordinary maturity was that at an early age she was forced to look death in the face, and she did not blink.  In his concluding chapter, Robert Greene focuses on her life as a case study.

Chapter 18.  Meditate on Our Common Mortality. The Law of Death Denial 

The only child of a father with whom she bonded deeply, who died of systemic lupus erythematosus, and a mother who was much less bonded with her, Flannery O’Connor was shy and bookish growing up, already showing literary talent by the age of twelve.   When she was just fifteen years old, her beloved father died; he was just forty-five.  A devout Catholic, Flannery aimed to focus on her literary genius and to do this she left Georgia, on a full scholarship to the University of Iowa in 1945.  Soon her stories were appearing in prestigious magazines and publishers sought her attention. Around Christmas of 1949, however, she fell ill and within months she was found to have the same disease that had killed her father. Despite cortisone therapy, she knew that death was approaching.  Circumstances soon forced her to return to the family farm, a kind of prison for her, just outside Milledgeville, Georgia.  Yet she accepted it and went on producing her powerful stories, writing at one point to a friend, “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.”

By this time, she was also becoming keenly aware of the superficiality of life in America, a materialistic and soulless culture as she saw it.  So many people were without any sense of purpose.  “And at the core of these problems was their inability to face their own mortality and the seriousness of it. …As she saw it, people were losing their humanity and capable of all kinds of cruelties. They did not seem to care very deeply about one another….  If they could only see what she had seen – how our time is so short, how everyone must suffer and die – it would alter their way of life; it would make them grow up; it would melt all their coldness.”

In 1953 she met a tall, handsome twenty-six-year-old man from Denmark, Erik Langkjaier, a travelling textbook salesman who had asked to meet this literary genius of Georgia.  Soon there was a relationship between them.  When Erik announced he was taking a six-month leave of absence to return to Denmark, Flannery began writing letters to him, expressing how much their meetings had meant to her.  She felt there was a bond between them.  Then came the news that he was engaged to be married to a Danish woman.  “She had intuited such an event would happen, but the news was a shock nonetheless.  She replied with utmost politeness, congratulating him, and they wrote to each other for several more years, but she could not get over this loss so easily. She had tried to protect herself from any deep feelings of…separation because they were too unbearable for her.  They were like small reminders of the death that would take her away at any moment, while others would go on living and loving.  And now those very feelings of separation came pouring in.” 

Now she knew that her life would forever be lived alone.  The heightened awareness of her fate became the impetus for more stories, rich with “her knowledge of people and their vulnerabilities.”  Her relentless drive to produce these stories, against advice from her doctors to stop working, led her to hide her notebooks or even to keep the stories in her memory until she could write them down.  “She died in the early hours of August 3, at the age of thirty-nine.  In accordance with her last wishes, Flannery was buried next to her father.”

As Flannery saw it, her heightened empathy for other human beings was a consequence of her having looked death “squarely in the eye without flinching.”  She learned what really matters in life and “was thoroughly at home with the ultimate reality represented by death.”   Her “empathy and feeling of unity with others, as evidenced by her strong desire to communicate with all types of people, caused her to eventually let go of one of her greatest limitations: the racist sentiments toward African Americans she had internalized from her mother and many others in the South. …By the early 1960s she came to embrace the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.” 

Flannery O’Connor had an advantage over most of us, Greene explains, in that she was “compelled to confront death and make use of her awareness of it.”  Death “is a fate shared by us all and something that should bind us in a deeply empathic way.  We are all a part of the brotherhood and sisterhood of death.”  He refers to the paradoxical death effect.  Awareness of our mortality makes us feel more awake and alive, as well illustrated by the history of Flannery O’Connor.  “By connecting to the reality of death, we connect more profoundly to the reality and fullness of life.  By separating death from life and repressing our awareness of it, we do the opposite.” 

The author advises us to make our awareness visceral, as if we had just been given a death sentence.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky experienced exactly that wakening when he and other alleged conspirators were told they would be executed that very day.  The sentence was commuted, but the awakening remained.  Awaken to the shortness of life.  See the mortality in everyone.  “Let us look at the pedestrians in any busy city and realize that in ninety years it is likely that none of them will be alive, including us. …Our unique consciousness of death has created our particular form of love.” 

Embrace all pain and adversity.  We have a choice between avoiding things that might lead to failure or other painful experiences; or to live life fully, “to commit ourselves to what Friedrich Nietzsche called amor fati (‘love of fate’): wanting nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity.  Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity. . . but to love it.’”  We can choose to see (as did Flannery O’Connor) that everything happens for a reason.  

Open the mind to the Sublime.  We can encounter the Sublime by thinking about the origin of life on earth or by contemplating the night sky and thinking of how miniscule a place our planet or the solar system has in the universe.  “In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver, a foretaste of death itself, something too large for our minds to encompass.” 

As we become more aware of our mortality, “we experience a taste of true freedom. …We can be more daring without feeling afraid of the consequences. …We can commit fully to our work, to our relationships, to all our actions.”

Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom…. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. – Michel de Montaigne