The Circle of Compassion

Man likes to believe he and the group he identifies with is important and superior to others. That is the reason that the Church believed in an earth centered universe. Galileo's book, the 'Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems' (1632) made such a compelling argument for the sun centered hypothesis that the Catholic Church prevented him from publishing it. He was forced to recant by the Inquisition and to spend the last 10 years of his life under house arrest. Not only does man wish to believe in his importance and superiority, he feels threatened by those who challenge his belief and in some cases will create paranoia toward them and act against them.

The belief in one's group's superiority has been a major cause of war. For example the American belief in manifest destiny led the United States to get into wars. The German belief that they were a master race led them to enslave most of Europe.

Albert Einstein once wrote about the human delusion of being part of a group that is separate from others. He wrote:

We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest...This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

Why does man think this way? Perhaps clues for this question can be found in nature. When sponge cells that are genetically closely related come in contact with each other they fuse and form a colony. Doing this is of mutual benefit to all the sponge cells. If sponge cells that are distantly related come into contact they destroy each other and a sponge free zone forms. Evolutions creates life forms that propagate themselves. In certain cases if they destroy the competition they propagate more than if they cooperate with the competition. Even though all men are from the same species groups evolve among men many of which that are similar to the sponges and that destroy those who are not members of the same group.

A classic example of thinking of "Us" as different than "them" is how the U.S. government views suicide bombings of Israelis and how it views the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center. Joe McCain, the brother of John McCain wrote the following about that: (Freeman List Mailing 5/7/03)

The irony goes unnoticed -- while we are hammering away to punish those who brought the horrors of last September here, we restrain the Israelis from the same retaliation. Not the same thing, of course -- We are We; they are they.

There is a price to be paid for us vs them thinking. When we leave them to suffer under the heals of a dictatorship because we don't care about them the way we care about ourselves, that dictatorship is likely to bite us. If we don't care what happens to the North Koreans under the heel of their North Korean dictator for example, and we allow the nightmare oppression of North Koreans to continue, we will care when North Korean nuclear weapons proliferate around the world.

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