@lsusr recently did a video about this. Interestingly, he thought that the hardest people to love were not actually the Hitler type (they are still hard), but the people that you are actively hurting.
to put it another way, hard: loving hitler; harder: being hitler and loving your victims. this is why I think hitler is not an ideal choice for these thought experiments, in fact.
he thought that the hardest people to love were not actually the Hitler type (they are still hard), but the people that you are actively hurting.
yeah that does seem plausible to me. (I haven’t watched the whole video just because videoformats are harder/less-worth-it for me)
I’m not sure it resonates for me-in-particular, but it’d make sense if this was a common tendency, and it’d make sense if it was truer of me than I’d like to admit.
There’s a bunch of people I’m conscious of having hurt, who I did specifically empathize with, and while I don’t at all have strong belief I did a particularly good job loving them, I’m think I was at least doing something love-adjaecent.
Some plausible dimensions here:
I am hurting them?
Are they hurting me?
Do they seem more powerful than me? Or, powerful “enough” that they seem to be able to take care of themselves?
Are they a present, active force entangled in my life (as opposed to a dead historical figure who I’m seeing more in “far mode”)
I think in addition to the “specific individual people I’ve personally hurt” case, there’s the case of people (or animals) who were probably hurt structurally downstream of choices I’ve made (e.g. animals hurt by my consuming animal products, or perhaps, like, people in coerced labor situations who made products I bought, or something), or possibly also people I chose not to help (e.g. homeless people who asked me for money I didn’t give them)? I think in these cases (but also some ~interpersonal-conflict-type cases) I have a kind of conflicting mix of (a) an urge towards compassion (b) something like a block on compassion, a flinching away from letting myself feel it (c) sometimes something like anger for ~putting me in a situation where I feel this way?
I think in these situations one case for prioritizing & making space for compassion on purpose is that in fact it’s often already there but I am fighting it and tying myself up in painful and useless internal conflict, whereas if I can find a stance where I am allowing myself to feel it and still make tradeoffs about it, I do not get stuck in this way. But it can be hard given the ~block on thinking about it.
Whereas I guess in the Hitler case (or, personally my default example of person-who-I-find-it-unusually-easy-to-hate is Stalin) my default stance doesn’t have all that much compassion in it so rather than removing a block I have to cultivate the compassion in the first place? But if I’m going ahead and thinking about it there’s not necessarily the same kind of mental block involved. So I guess it’s harder in some ways, easier in others.
@lsusr recently did a video about this. Interestingly, he thought that the hardest people to love were not actually the Hitler type (they are still hard), but the people that you are actively hurting.
to put it another way, hard: loving hitler; harder: being hitler and loving your victims. this is why I think hitler is not an ideal choice for these thought experiments, in fact.
yeah that does seem plausible to me. (I haven’t watched the whole video just because videoformats are harder/less-worth-it for me)
I’m not sure it resonates for me-in-particular, but it’d make sense if this was a common tendency, and it’d make sense if it was truer of me than I’d like to admit.
There’s a bunch of people I’m conscious of having hurt, who I did specifically empathize with, and while I don’t at all have strong belief I did a particularly good job loving them, I’m think I was at least doing something love-adjaecent.
Some plausible dimensions here:
I am hurting them?
Are they hurting me?
Do they seem more powerful than me? Or, powerful “enough” that they seem to be able to take care of themselves?
Are they a present, active force entangled in my life (as opposed to a dead historical figure who I’m seeing more in “far mode”)
The video can be summarized by these two lines at timestamp 5:39.
I use the word “love” but, as you noted, that word has many definitions. It would be less ambiguous if I were to say “compassion”.
I think in addition to the “specific individual people I’ve personally hurt” case, there’s the case of people (or animals) who were probably hurt structurally downstream of choices I’ve made (e.g. animals hurt by my consuming animal products, or perhaps, like, people in coerced labor situations who made products I bought, or something), or possibly also people I chose not to help (e.g. homeless people who asked me for money I didn’t give them)? I think in these cases (but also some ~interpersonal-conflict-type cases) I have a kind of conflicting mix of (a) an urge towards compassion (b) something like a block on compassion, a flinching away from letting myself feel it (c) sometimes something like anger for ~putting me in a situation where I feel this way?
I think in these situations one case for prioritizing & making space for compassion on purpose is that in fact it’s often already there but I am fighting it and tying myself up in painful and useless internal conflict, whereas if I can find a stance where I am allowing myself to feel it and still make tradeoffs about it, I do not get stuck in this way. But it can be hard given the ~block on thinking about it.
Whereas I guess in the Hitler case (or, personally my default example of person-who-I-find-it-unusually-easy-to-hate is Stalin) my default stance doesn’t have all that much compassion in it so rather than removing a block I have to cultivate the compassion in the first place? But if I’m going ahead and thinking about it there’s not necessarily the same kind of mental block involved. So I guess it’s harder in some ways, easier in others.