“If the Earth were your body, you would be able to feel the many areas where it is suffering.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
Some days, the world breaks our heart. We turn on the news and we learn of another act of violence and anger and hate and rage. Our stomach sinks. Our heart aches. Our throat clenches. Our bodies do feel the suffering of the world.
We may feel powerless… afraid… bewildered… angry… sad… overwhelmed… or all of the above. We want to know why. We want to know how to stop it from happening again.
When the world breaks our heart, we often want to break the world right back. We blame, scapegoat, or demand revenge. We dehumanize those who have violently inflicted their own suffering on others.
It’s at times like this, when the world breaks our heart, that we probably have a hard time being mindful and nonjudgmental.
Because practicing mindfulness means we’ve accepted the challenge to not just observe the world, but heal the world.
And it’s when mindfulness is so damn hard that it is most needed. The days that break our heart are the days that remind us of the importance of our compassionate engagement with the world.
Compassion is HARD. True compassion is not just hearts and rainbows for people who look and think and act like us and “do the right thing.”
Compassion is the genuine desire for ALL BEINGS to be free of suffering, for ALL BEINGS to be happy, healthy, and loved.
Even the bad guys.
Even the guys who break our hearts.
Several years ago, as we explored compassion and lovingkindness practice in my Brilliant Mindful YOU course, a participant asked a common question that comes up when we talk about radical compassion: “Do we include people like Hitler in lovingkindness practice?”
The easy answer is, “No, not if you don’t feel like it.”
But the hard answer is, “Yes.”
When we practice compassion, we don’t exclude anyone.
Compassion is fundamentally a recognition of our common humanity. When you suffer, I suffer. What pains you, pains me.
In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign, I saw an interview with Jeb Bush in which the reporter asked him, bizarrely enough, if he would have killed baby Hitler if he had had the chance.
Despite the absurdity of the question, and the ridiculousness of posing this question to a presidential candidate, Bush responded, that yes, he would kill baby Hitler. My mouth dropped. Really?
The newscasters wholeheartedly agreed with Bush’s response. One of them even said, “There’s only one answer to that question: YES. How could anyone answer differently?”
I was stunned. Was I the only one who couldn’t give a definitive YES on that question? Perhaps it’s because I am a history teacher and I know the illogical nature of counter-factual thinking. But I was really wondering, “Do you think it’s that simple? Do you think you can get rid of one guy and then stop evil? What if instead of killing baby Hitler, you prevented his parents from dying when he was young, leaving him to live on an orphan’s pension and in homeless shelters as a teen and young adult? What if you addressed the anti-Semitism that had been brewing as a small-but-not-insignificant component of German nationalism for a century before his birth? What if you rewrote the Treaty of Versailles that doomed the German democracy in the 1920’s before it was even born? What if…. What if….?…” The events of history are not so easily reducible.
The problem with all of this thinking — killing one bad guy, “exterminating” the extremists, getting the “animals” out of our country — is that it assumes that “those guys” are somehow fundamentally different from us.
It’s too easy to write off the bad guys as somehow less than human, as “crazies,” as “psychopaths.” Are some of them legitimately unbalanced? Probably. But I’m not a psychiatrist, so I’ll leave that diagnosis to the professionals.
What I do know is that as human beings, we all have an innate capacity for goodness, as well as a capacity for evil. Which capacity is nurtured? Which one will manifest itself in our lives?
Sadly, our human history is full of examples of man’s … inhumanity to man. But we also know that — terrifyingly — many of those inhuman acts were committed by quite ordinary men. In Christopher Browning’s powerful book Ordinary Men, he studies the experiences of a special WWII battalion that was assigned to carry out the Final Solution in Poland in 1941. The men truly were ordinary — fathers, sons, teachers, laborers — yet they ultimately committed some of the most atrocious acts of the Holocaust. They rounded up innocent civilians and then shot them (unarmed, and often naked) into mass graves.
The first time the battalion had to carry out a roundup, the men were horrified. The generals had to keep the men drunk for 48 hours afterward, and the soldiers continued to have nightmares for weeks and were clearly distressed. But then these horrific acts eventually became normal. The men even started to look forward to them. Shockingly, when the men were given — at every new roundup — the chance to opt out of the killing, over 80% of them agreed to carry out their duties.
Browning’s book ends with the chilling question, “If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what men would not?”
In the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, a fictionalized account of the trial of Nazi judges and justice officials in 1948, Judge Dan Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy) states that if the defendants had been “depraved perverts — if the leaders of the Third Reich were sadistic monsters and maniacs — these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or other natural catastrophes. But … under the stress of a national crisis, men — even able and extraordinary men — can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination.”
To say that those people who commit evil and atrocious acts are psychopaths, or somehow fundamentally different from us, is, in many ways, the easy way out.
Then there’s nothing we can do, because “crazy is as crazy does.” We mourn the dead, and we move on, wiping our hands of the incident — whether it’s a school shooting or an act of terrorism or even an act of genocide. These things can’t be prevented, we hear some of our officials say.
When we take this view, we assume that the answer IS to kill the little baby that history tells us will become a mass murderer, instead of seeing an infinite number of opportunities to transform the world that little baby will grow up in.
I took a semester-long course on the Holocaust in college, and we spent weeks and weeks discussing responsibility and blame and guilt and the “good people who do nothing” and allow evil to triumph. I remember my professor asking us, How do we create a society where people stand up to evil? How do we create a society where the good is nurtured in people?
I’m not asking that you empathize with people who commit the acts that break our hearts. I’m not asking you to “see things from their perspective.” I’m not asking you to like these people.
I’m simply asking that we see them AS PEOPLE, not monsters. I’m asking that we, as Brene Brown encourages us to do in Rising Strong, hold them accountable for their actions, while also acknowledging their humanity. I’m asking you to simply consider what happens in a person’s life to lead them to commit these acts. And then think about what we can do — what WE OURSELVES can do — to nurture goodness in others and in the world.
I’m asking you to include all people in your sphere of compassion. There’s no need to ration compassion; it’s an entirely renewable resource. Including the “bad guys” in your wishes of lovingkindness in no way limits the amount of love and empathy you can send to their victims.
This is when practicing compassion is HARD. If it were easy, we wouldn’t celebrate the Gandhis and Mandelas and Jesuses and Buddhas who exemplified this form of lovingkindness.
True compassion is HARD because it holds us accountable. How do we create a world where people who need help get help? How do we create a world that doesn’t stigmatize those with mental illness? How do we create a world where it’s okay to talk about the dark things that trouble us so we can get help before our suffering is inflicted on others? How do we create a world where people confront hate with love? How do we create a world that doesn’t lead people to think that acts of terror and violence are the best way to spread their message?
I think a big part of the solution is radical compassion. Let’s wish that ALL PEOPLE be happy, healthy, and loved. And then let’s work to make it so.
Because people who are happy and healthy and loved probably won’t hurt other people.
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