TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
I think if there's one technique that we would all do well to learn, it's to stop ranking our suffering. It's hard not to do this. We instinctively tend to compare our suffering with that of others. And we tend to think that there is a kind of hierarchy, where some kinds of suffering are more worthy of our attention, concern, and compassion than others. I'm sure we all have watched videos of people in horrible situations and had a feeling of humility as our own struggles suddenly began to seem silly in comparison. I'm sure there is an evolutionary origin to this instinct. If we were all hunting a mammoth together, we would need to prioritize helping the tribe member with a severed arm over the one with a splinter in his finger. But I think that it, like plenty of other perfectly comprehensible evolutionary instincts, is causing us a great deal of societal tension today. We have a perverse sort of desire to turn suffering into a competition. But this is wrong to do. We should all be entitled to suffer.
Sure, if you sketch it out, most would say it would be wrong to force us to view suffering as a competition. You could never imagine going to a grieving widow and saying that some other woman lost both her husband AND her two children! But most of us fall back on this natural but often perverse instinct. I remember back in the Tumblr SJW wars before 2016, which I was present for far more of than I would care to admit, the phrase "oppression olympics" was thrown around a lot. And it really does capture what it often turns into when we start ranking different kinds of suffering. It turns our compassion and sympathy into a very inhuman sort of calculus. Now keep in mind that I'm not using some lazy anti-"woke" statement here, because I hate that kind of language and find that whole niche to be repulsive. But I do always feel disappointed when I see people indulge in saying nasty, essentializing things about groups who they consider to be "privileged." Many groups are privileged. Anyone with the freedom to spend time complaining online certainly is. But even if they are and saying this kind of bigoted stuff won't materially have as much of an effect on them, I find this to be a poor justification. To me this always felt like throwing an empty bottle in the ocean and then saying "This does nothing. Do you even know how many tons of garbage get dumped in the ocean by large corporations each year?" It just seems like an excuse to be irresponsible or, in this case, cruel.
And I think that all of this occurs as a side-effect of our modern attention economy. Everything has to be described as the worst thing ever at any given time, because if it isn't, people won't feel like they have the time or the moral duty to look at it. And the next section here might be controversial, but let me just say that I am only making an observation about people's language and not giving any opinion on geopolitics: I find it somewhat strange how much energy gets expended arguing among people outside of agencies like the UN about whether what is going on in places like Gaza, or Xinjiang, or Ukraine is a "genocide" or not. I’m going to be honest: I don't know enough to say myself. I remain agnostic on whether we could call what is going on in those places "genocides," and don't wish to make a claim in the affirmative or negative. But some people might think that me doing so is an attempt to say that what is going on in those places is not terrible and tragic. And that's precisely the issue. Why should that be the case? Does something have to be a genocide to be terrible? I can think of some of the worst crimes of modern history which I would not call genocides: US atrocities in Vietnam, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and placement of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its sordid aftermath in the American south, Belgium's rape and exploitation of the Congo, the Rape of Nanking and Bataan Death March, the destruction of ancient cultural heritage sites by the Taliban and ISIS, and I could of course go on...
I do tend to choose my words carefully, and "genocide" is one of them. So for me at least, I will not use the word "genocide" to refer to what is going on in Gaza, in Xinjiang, or in Ukraine. But the problem is that people now somehow think I'm trying to soften or excuse what is going on in those places when all three are clearly horrific. And I think the reason is that when most people use words like "genocide" today, they aren't really thinking through and defining what they see by that word. It feels to me like they are really emoting that they feel that what is happening is terrible and needs attention. But in today's attention economy, you have so many other things to compete with that are also awful and depressing. So they resort to the word "genocide," because in the ranking of bad things, it's pretty much the worst thing there is. And that's where I see the issue: In order to be worthy of attention, it has to be literally the worst crime possible. Of course, it's not the only example. Everyone uses the most extreme language and rhetoric to describe anything today. And it dulls people to real suffering in the world.
So what should we do? View everyone as a victim, because we are all victims of existence:
If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony, or ἐργαστήριον as the earliest philosopher called it. [...]
If you accustom yourself to this view you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nor, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way. [...]
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On the Sufferings of the World" [1]
We are all entitled to suffer. If we are to comfort each other in our distress, the first thing we must do is see ourselves as fellow-travelers on the road of suffering.