What blocks compassion?
anja.kefala.info
anja.kefala.info
But I have had to face these types of things. Long, sad, story. Bring your hanky.
In both cases (fear and anger), the feeling needs to be temporary, if at all possible, because they are protective armor, meant to gear up our bodies and brains for a "fight or flight" scenario.
When I am fearful (including angry), my brain doesn't get "stupid," but it gets "binary." There's no "gray areas," or calculation of long-term cost. Only "No Threat" or "Threat." Bad decisions get made, very quickly, when we are on a fear binge. That's one reason why "managing by fear" is a pretty bad idea for knowledge workers. Soldiers and first responders train on how to make decisions under fear stress, but they know their limits, and their decisions are very much "short term."
Demagogues have known for centuries, that, if you get the people scared, you can make them support pretty much anything that you want. They know how to guide that "binary" thinking.
Compassion is important, and one way (in my experience) to learn it, is to work with people that are hard to like.
As an experiment, in 2012 I spent a week on the road to hand-deliver a letter of need (not my own) to 25 of the largest philanthropists to liberal causes. Not one of them responded or helped personally, six of them had a staffer send a form letter of rejection.
My conclusion is that compassion is too often valued only when self-serving. i.e. Dozens of uber-wealthy donate to charities that support the homeless and/or drug addicted, but view the "actual people" who collectively define the issue with suspicion and disdain.
Compassion felt towards animal prey and enemy tribes is maladaptive. We had to eat and be able to kill others in a skirmish.
So it's no wonder people can switch it on and off in the presence or absence of contextual cues. It's in essence a thing that's designed to be self-serving.
Something about that triggers an emotional and compassionate response to their distress; and this seems to be hard wired into our brains.
That would seem to be a complication for what you are suggesting.
One answer is that it's an evolutionary arms race. Evolution vs evolution has no clear winner. In this case, it's powerful artificial selection by dog breeders to create products that co-opt our compassion for our children.
Another answer is that evolution needs more time to figure out how to beat it.
Another answer is that it's not actually maladaptive because the assumption that pets reduce children isn't true. It may be adaptive because having a pet increases happiness. But even if this is true, it doesn't impact the validity of the thesis that compassion is a self-serving adaptation that gets switched off when needed.
As far as I know, bear cubs, wolf cubs, tiny lizards, etc have been cute for the entirety of recorded history, and probably much longer.
So that does not seem like a very apt comparison.
Also I think that you are conflating the survival mechanism of an organism - for example malaria latency - with a maladaptive immune response of the host - for example cytokine storm.
Example: “Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models”, review paper from 2018 — https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.0005...
Another example: “Matters of the heart: Biobehavioral mechanisms underlying grief”, a study from 2021 – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645302...
There are an alarmingly large number of people who use the word 'compassion' when they see substance abuse addicts preferring to live on the streets and causing mayhem, often due to their resulting serious mental illness.
Unless you have practical, effective solutions for those people and the society they live amongst I would argue much of what people like to think is 'compassion' is actually cruel enablement that perpetuates suffering.
That 'compassion' is invariably well meaning but all too often wildly impractical and can actually make the suffering worse.
Consider the narrative on the topic between Schopenhauer (compassion) and Nietzsche (pity).
Physics plays some part here, if only because compassion involves change and motion, where pity remains emotional.
This is a circular definition of compassion, according to Buddhism. Rather, Buddhism defines compassion as the wish for others not to suffer, and loving-kindness as the wish for others to have happiness.