There is an interesting thread I ran across on twitter.  

https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1678005338589601792

“Whenever I see a tweeter calling for violence or celebrating someone’s death, they almost always have #BeKind or pronouns or a rainbow flag in their bio. Perhaps the same emotionality that gives a person unrestrained compassion also gives them unrestrained cruelty.”

For some time, I’ve noticed this behavior too. The same people who would say “love wins” or “NoH8” can be the most vicious people. I hypothesized that maybe I was just misunderstanding the word “love”. For me, love is a personal feeling of deep affection. But for these others, love seemed to be adherence to a set of political policies, not an internal attitude towards actual people. For them, they could claim they are loving and caring people because they supported the correct set of policies, and it really didn’t matter how they carried themselves towards actual people in real life.

One of the responses to the thread was this clip from a teacher talking about oxytocin.  

https://twitter.com/MikeNayna/status/1678020357674921984

The professor says oxytocin is seen to promote being more pro-social. But an interesting thing happens. In the classic “runaway tram” thought experiment, where you can save 5 people by sacrificing one, if you give people oxytocin, they are much more willing to sacrifice people in the out group. In other words, oxytocin isn’t more pro-social, it’s more pro-your-in-group.  

As the original tweet said, perhaps high levels of compassion can also mean high levels of cruelty.

There is even an allusion to this in various statements I’ve encountered over the years. I can’t find the reference to it right now, but one of the things I’ve seen over this last weekend was a tweet stating something along the lines of Nazis not having any philosophical justification for protection. It’s the kind of idea that says it’s ok to punch (or worse…) a nazi since, you know, they’re nazi’s and they’re just evil people. You’re probably not only morally justified in mistreating Nazis, you may even have a moral responsibility to mistreat them, because the greater good of society is dependent on Nazis not having their way.

Now, we can all (or many of us) think of instances where this kind of violence is justified. If we know of an imminent threat to our children; a gang of pedophiles is waiting around the corner from the school to abduct the first 6 year old girl that they find, would be willing to proactively eliminate the threat? I would think most of us would. The pedophiles are intent on evil, and they need to be stopped one way or the other. Maybe many would prefer to just stop them, but there are others that think, just blocking them this time won’t solve the problem. The threat they pose needs to be eliminated, so even killing them would be justified.

In some situations then, it would appear that violence, even murder, is the humane response. Of course the trick that has been utilized forever is in convincing your people that the other group is of such a nature.  

Perhaps the higher levels of oxytocin lead to higher levels of ‘compassion’ that people on the left feel. And that same elevated emotional level leads them to also feel much stronger hatred towards those that are not part of their group. That makes more sense to me than my original hypothesis of them using the term “love” to describe adherence to a certain set of policies rather than actual human love. My hypothesis may, in fact, be true. But it doesn’t really explain much, and so probably doesn’t reach the definition of “hypothesis”. 

There were a couple of responses in the thread that seemed to confirm some of my thoughts.

“The rise of social media as the primary mode of social interaction has caused us to substantially overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are cheap and easy to counterfeit.”

That’s an interesting thought. I don’t know if it’s true, but it might be an accurate explanation for how we got from compassion being 1) the way we treat others, to 2) the way we think about issues. If being compassionate is 1), then even when we disagree with others, compassion is to treat them with respect. But if compassion is 2), then how we treat others is irrelevant.  

“Defining morality as a set of beliefs instead of actions gives one with the right beliefs the license to commit the most horrendous actions.”

“Many people feel virtuous while acting like beasts, because they determine their virtue not by how they behave but merely by what they believe.”

These two responses are different formulation of my hypothesis: ‘love’ was defined as support of the correct policies, not how one carried oneself in relation to others. In so doing, you could claim the mantle of compassion and love, while acting horribly towards others. I have on occasion formulated it this way too: some people love ‘humanity’, while utterly despising actual humans.

“Jung was on to something with his concept of the personality and THE SHADOW. People ignorant of their shadow are very dangerous and only see the darkness externally to them. They then feel vindicated in attacking however they like.”

I don’t know the concept Jung came up with regarding the ‘shadow’, so I’m interested in understanding this a bit more.