1000 Voices Speak for Compassion is five years old.

In the early days of January 2015, as millions of people around the world reeled in shock after Islamist terrorists burst into offices in Paris and murdered journalists at the Charlie Hebdo magazine, another group of Islamist terrorists, Boko Haram, swept through towns and villages in northeast Nigeria massacring anyone who couldn’t run fast enough to escape. Though the murders in Paris were bad enough, it was the thought of men rampaging through villages killing children, women and the elderly that gripped me and that still comes to mind when I consider the questions a Facebook friend, Lizzi, asked in response to the a something I’d posted about Boko Haram.
“Why?”
“What makes someone behave in this way?”
And, “How can we change it?”

Five years ago, I felt hopeful that compassion could create the change we needed. And so I sent out a call asking who would like to join me in writing about compassion on a single day. My hope was that our words of compassion might in some small way aid in creating a more compassionate world.

Five years of #1000Speak, has anything changed?

Five years on, nothing much seems to have changed. Five years on, in the UK we have a Home Secretary who has just proposed new immigration laws that her own parents, who came to the UK in the 1960s, would fail. We have government ministers demanding social media must do more to remove “unacceptable content” after television presenter’s suicide, while the National Audit Office implicates government policies in the suicides of at least 69 benefits claimants. And we have a prime minister who uses the language of war while he claims to be standing up the EU bullies in preparation to “negotiate” an exit treaty. Our country isn’t unique. In the USA, Hungary, Brazil, India and several others, hard-right politicians use inflammatory language to disparage anyone they see as a threat.

A world filled with conflict

Around the world we have the seemingly endless conflict. Wikipedia has a list of worldwide wars (1000 – 9999 deaths in the last year) and major wars (10,0000+ deaths) raging in 2020. Of these, three started in the twentieth century, with the oldest conflict (in Afghanistan) going on since 1978. If you are 42 and live in Afghanistan, you have never known a country at peace.
So are we just beating our heads against brick walls when we write about compassion? Does compassion make no difference? Are those of use trying to encourage its development in humanity just wasting our time? Maybe it’s just human nature to be violent? After all, conflict has been a part of our existence since before history. Is it even possible to resolve conflict without violence?

In spite of everything, I still believe the answer to that last question is yes. And I also believe that the answer lies within everyone of us, not just with governments and leaders.

The answer is inside

This idea, that we hold the answer inside ourselves, doesn’t mean that you have to solve all the problems of the world by yourself. That could lead you to take on too much responsibility and feel hopeless. And that’s not going to help anyone or the planet.

So I’m not suggesting that you or I need to go out personally and convince Trump or Johnson to adhere to the Paris 2015 Climate agreement or to change their policies on immigration. We can only do that collectively, in the same way that, over decades, collectively we have changed perspectives of governments and ordinary people on race, women’s rights, gay people’s rights, the climate crisis and many other issues.

Of course, there’s still much room for improvement, but it’s important to recognise the gains we have made. Take the climate crisis for instance, which is violence against our beautiful planet and which needs to end soon if we are to survive. Decades ago, when I began recycling and eating organic food, I was weird; now I’m becoming normal. It might seem as if Greta Thunberg has run a one-girl crusade against carbon burning mega-polluters , but she’d be the first to say that’s not true. She wasn’t even the first young girl to plead with UN leaders to create change before it’s too late. Severn Cullis-Suzuki did it in 1992. Thunberg’s actions became possible because of those that came before her, because of changes in perspective that had already taken place within Sweden and elsewhere.

And what created those changes?

How change happens

I began recycling paper and cardboard when I lived in a city that had its own paper mill and did a kerbside collection. It was easy for me to recycle paper, and once I’d got into the recycling frame of mind, it wasn’t a huge leap to take my bottles to the bottle bank. But even before that, I’d shared a flat in London with a woman who was a member of Friends of the Earth, (when that was also weird). She had a huge stack of magazines in the hallway that eventually she took to a paper bank. So maybe I was already semi-aware of the issues.

About the same time scientists discovered a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, and pinned the blame on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in aerosol sprays and fridges. Almost everyone I knew stopped using sprays with CFCs.The hole in the ozone layer was scary – but – and I think this is hugely important – we could do something about it. As people stopped using aerosols, manufacturers realised they had to adapt or die, so non CFC aerosols appeared along with pump sprays.

So that’s one way that the power to create change is within us. We make the changes we want to see, and people join us. When enough people do, the general awareness changes. And nowhere does this have a bigger impact than when we change our thinking, and how we think about our thinking.

I’m going to make a bold assumption and presume that since you are reading this blog, there’s a good chance you don’t support the hard-right politicians that are currently running most countries in our world. You may even think that if only we could get rid of them we’ll have peace and harmony, and we will be able to resolve conflicts without violence – because it’s their fault after all, isn’t it?

The problem with that is: the kind of thinking that drives them is in every one of us. To destroy it, we’d have to destroy ourselves.
Physician, Gabor Mate says: “If I see the world as a horrible place… I want to attack before I get attacked. I’ll always be looking out for myself because the world is not to be trusted. So, if that’s the world you live in, that’s the world you’re going to create.”

Who hasn’t felt this way sometimes – that the world is a horrible place and that if you don’t watch out for yourself, you will get attacked? You may even think you’re standing up for others when you reach out to attack the ‘bad’ guys, but the core belief remains the same: “People who disagree with me are bad.” (Mate was talking about what he considers to be Trump’s perspective in the quote above, but I’ve heard many, many people who totally disagree with Trump say almost the same thing.)

A world of outrage

We live in a state of outrage, fuelled by tabloid press and social media. On any given day on Twitter or Facebook, it takes a few seconds to find people raging about something someone has said. A quote will be shared and reshared, showing just how terrible this person is. Often the people sharing the outrageous comment are from a different political party than the person they quote, though it could just be from a different faction of the same party. In this way, “people like us” becomes a smaller and smaller group.

And people “not like us” quickly become inferior, and therefore it’s okay to attack them, either verbally or physically.

In the 1970s, when Philip Zimbardo was a psychology professor at the university of Stanford, he set up an experiment, which consisted of a simulated prison with students employed to act as “guards” and “prisoners.” Within hours, the guards were talking about: “These are dangerous prisoners. We have to show them who is in control.” The experiment degenerated so quickly into sadistic violence that it was stopped after 5 days.

Zimbardo says, “I said, ‘No physical force,’ but I didn’t limit psychological force.” Each day that passed, the ‘guards’ would find new ways to humiliate the ‘prisoners.’”

When a “prisoner’ had an emotional breakdown, Zimbardo’s team released him, but he says, “I thought we’d made a mistake in our selection procedure. He must have been in quote, ‘defective.’”

It was a visit from Zimbardo’s girlfriend that brought the experiment rapidly to an end. She wasn’t the first person to visit from outside, but she was the first person to say what was happening was wrong.

Zimbardo believes that we all have the capacity for violence and that the situation is what causes violence. He cites a study by anthropologist John Watson of 23 cultures found that how cultures go to war has a big impact on their behaviour. ‘If they don’t change their appearance only one of eight kills, torture, mutilate. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13, that’s 90 percent, kill, torture, mutilate.’

Inside the brain of a psychopath

In 2005, neuroscientist Jim Fallon was studying brain scans of serial killers, comparing them to scans of people with various mental health issues and none. Among the “normal” scans was a group from his family, and one of them matched the patterns in the murderous psychopathic brains. Deeply curious, Fallon investigated – and discovered the psychopathic brain was his.

Until then, Fallon had believed that genes make us who we are, but his discovery forced him to reconsider. Now he sees his childhood kept him from what his genes could have had in store. “I was loved, and that protected me,” he says. Someone with his genetic make-up who grew up with violence or neglect would most likely develop full-blown psychopathy. Fallon says that while behavioural training of pre-adolescents with signs of psychopathy “are promising,” he doubts anyone who has reached teens or adulthood with could experience reversal.

However, the youths detained in Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center (MJTC) are teenagers, and its treatment program has had remarkable success. Because punishments didn’t work, the boys were rewarded for even minor positive behaviour, and the “program had the greatest impact on serious violent offenses, reducing the risk of their incidence by about half.”

So, when punishment doesn’t work, it turns out rewards can. And this is true, not just of psychopaths, but for all of us. In most cultures around the world, punishment has long been used to try to keep behaviour in check. But as Fallon recognises and as the MJTC experience shows, kindness is more likely to reduce negative and create positive behaviours than punishments are. This doesn’t mean we release killers onto the streets to kill again, but it does mean we would gain more by teaching them that kindness is more likely to get them what they want.

Jim Fallon spoke to relatives and friends, and learned that though he wasn’t a murderer, he did have many unusual, and psychopathic, tendencies. With that discovery, he made a choice, and began to consider other people’s feelings and to ask himself, “What would a good person do here?” He says his motivation for doing so is not altruism but pride, that he wants to prove he can. I’m not sure that matters.

What this, and the MJTC treatment success indicates is that all the outrage and name-calling our culture is currently obsessed with is a waste of time. We don’t change psychopaths by calling them psychopaths and we don’t change people with different views from ours by tweeting a few of their words, and ranting about how appalling those words are.

Asking, “How?”

Instead, we would gain more benefit by doing what Fallon and Zimbardo did – looking at ourselves. Whether we ask, “How can I be this way?” as Fallon did, or, “How could I have done that?” as Zimbardo did, we need to be genuinely willing to see the answers waiting there for us.

This isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s far, far easier to look outside for someone or something to blame. But in the longterm, that hurts. In The Compassionate Mind[image error], pyschologist Paul Gilbert writes: “…when we give up blaming and condemning ourselves (and others) for things then we are freer to genuinely set sail towards developing the insight, knowledge and understanding we need to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions.”

Excuses don’t work, compassion does

This is my experience. The more I notice the urge to punish others or myself, the more I have choices. I can deny that urge, pretend it doesn’t exist, blame it on someone else, point outwards and say, “Well I might have done this, but what about what x did? It was even worse.” This is so common in politics it has a name: whataboutery, but we practice it in everyday life, trying to make ourselves feel just a little bit better. You yelled at your kids yesterday, but at least you weren’t as bad as that woman across the street who smacked her daughter in full view of everyone. I was late for work by a minute, but at least I’m not as bad as that guy who rolled in half an hour late, clearly hungover.

The trouble with whataboutery, is that it doesn’t actually achieve its aim. It doesn’t make us feel any better about ourselves, at least, not for more than a couple of seconds. The reason is simple: we only ever do it if we already feel bad about ourselves and believe what we did wasn’t good enough. It’s an excuse, an attempt to avoid others (or even ourselves) from seeing the badness inside us. You feel hellish for yelling at your kids, and expect other people to judge you. That someone else does something you consider even worse doesn’t take one thing away from your “crime.”

But self-compassion does. Or maybe it doesn’t so much take away from your “crime” as give you the capacity to approach the darker, more disagreeable parts of yourself with kindness. And that in turn gives you the capacity to approach the darker parts of others with kindness.

This is not the same as making excuses for someone. A while ago, I started a new job. The person I most often worked with had been promoted the day I started and from the very first day, she was short and unfriendly towards me. At first, I put it down to her feeling the stress of the new job, and tried to ignore it, but I began to dread going to work.

Then at home one day, instead of trying to understand her or make excuses for her, I allowed myself to fully feel all the hurt and pain inside me.
And then, only then, was I able to see that if she spoke to me like that, the way she spoke to herself was most likely even worse. Suddenly I went from trying to protect myself to allowing myself to feel safe, and from trying to make excuses for her to having compassion for her. And here’s the interesting thing – the next day when I was back at work, she was pleasant to me.

Though Zimbardo’s and Fallon’s work, we see that we all have capacity for violence, and we all have capacity for connection. And as Fallon’s work also shows, we all can make choices. We don’t have to destroy the violence within us to reach compassion, in fact we can’t. If we try to destroy any part of ourselves, we don’t have compassion but internal conflict. That keeps us trapped.

If we truly want to resolve conflict in the outer world, we have to start by ending it in the inner. It’s hard, hard work to look inside ourselves and see the darkness there, and the first instinct may always be to punish. If it is, we can ask something similar to the question Fallon asks, “What would a kind person do now?”

This post is for 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion’s 5th Anniversary. If you would like to read more posts about compassion or to add one of your own to our link-up, click on the button below.

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