There’s a saying that there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who have suffered and do not wish others to suffer; and those who have suffered and believe others should go through that too.
A friend recently mentioned that there is a third type. The people who believe that suffering is not real.
These people have either not suffered themselves (e.g. through privilege), and don’t have the scope of imagination to conceive of higher realms of suffering – or they believe that the only kind of suffering that matters is their own.
I think this is a much more dangerous kind of person than the first two.
Perhaps I’m biased, but it seems like the first kind of person holds very little risk to society. Those who are willing to sacrifice things to protect others, and who assume that the suffering of others is real and avoidable, are unlikely to directly cause wars and conflict. These people are often accused of being naïve.
The second kind of person is the typical “conservative” viewpoint: People need to work hard for their happiness. I worked hard and suffered to get where I am – why should I let you get it for free? While this viewpoint is often applied with a total lack of thought or subtlety, and assumes (without justification) that happiness is a zero-sum game; at least it acknowledges that people are suffering, and that people who have suffered deserve some kind of reparation.
The third kind of person is harder to relate to. They are skeptical about suffering. If they see someone begging in the street, they are more likely to assume that person is responsible for their situation than feel empathy for them. If they see a minority group requesting more discourse about racial equality in a public arena, they are more likely to assume that group is seeking an unfair advantage than genuinely trying to reduce oppression.
The third kind of person is a special mix of that conservative “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,” individualist kind of thinking, with a splash of sociopathy, often surrounded by a thick shell of privilege.
I have encountered more of this third kind of person in the past year, as I’ve become involved in more debates about social justice issues. Usually these people are the most vocal opposition in discussions about gender, racial oppression, safe spaces, sexual abuse, and trans rights.
A surprising number of these people come from the psychedelic community that I love so deeply. If you ever needed proof that psychedelics can amplify hatred and closed-mindedness just as effectively as they can love and empathy – look no further than these narcissistic “thought leaders” who have not had their minds open as far as respecting other people’s lives.
These people live entirely within the framework of their own experience. With an almost solipsistic intensity, these people will apply their own healing journey to the world. “I healed, and it just required me to realise that healing myself was a choice.”
I certainly accept that some people don’t want to be healed. And an important part of going on a healing journey is breaking down any internal barriers you may have to healing yourself.
But assuming that everyone else is just as stubborn as you once were, and just need to go through an introspective journey to get to salvation? And then, by extension, assuming that people who have not gone on that journey are simply refusing to heal themselves?
It’s quite frankly, a very limited kind of thinking.
I know for certain that other people have suffered more than you. That other people do desperately want to heal, and certainly don’t have the privilege of the only barrier to healing being a few personal neuroses. That there are people out there who are surrounded by very real physical barriers to healing. Who could be helped by people like you; if only you could see the walls and shackles that hold them in place.
There are of course people who are kept in literal chains, tortured and degraded every day of their lives; but there are also people whose restraints are less apparent – facing ridicule and derision, enforced poverty, daily racism and sexism, living in a hostile environment that threatens every aspect of their being in every waking moment.
Just because I have not lived through this kind of torture, does not mean that I will deny it when I see humans being hurt by other humans. To believe that these people aren’t really suffering, but are just preventing their own healing? It’s beyond sociopathic.
It’s a kind of robotic, uncompromising, short-sighted and mindless dogma the likes of which I have seen before: in the void of the most intensely traumatic psychedelic experiences. The inescapable darkness at the heart of reality. Evil incarnate, in all its soulless, unstoppable, awful mundanity.
“If you heal yourself, you heal the world.” This is the mantra of the empathically-deranged.
Only a person of immense thoughtlessness could believe that a world where they were personally happy and free of strife, yet everyone around them was burning in flames, was a healed world.
I would ask these people: Why are you so afraid of knocking down those walls you see around your fellow humans?
The true answer is that they are afraid of coming down from their enlightened fortress, and the risk of losing it to the suffering.
Disagree with this? Are you actually quite secure in your fortress of privilege? Prove me wrong on twitter @rjpatricksmith.
Pat's Hyperbolic Arboretum 