The Dark Side of Compassion

Sometimes, when you work in healthcare, you develop an acute sense of hatred towards humanity, arising out of compassion that has been stunned by the lack of mutual concern: their folly, their stupidity, their willful negligence... 

The wretchedness of their reality, and especially the self-inflicted affliction, is too much to observe passively, let alone love actively. The rage begins to consume you, and is directly proportional to your emotional investment.  

So you harden your heart and settle on indifference. You begin to love humanity only in the abstract. Yet still the blows continue. Everyday, you see the gluttony and the greed, the malaise and myopia within their beast-like hearts. 

Yet you hate yourself bitterly for this. You know that you must love them, yet you are repulsed. 

In The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the monk Father Zosima tells the story of a doctor who was afflicted with this: 

“It's just the same story as a doctor once told me,” observed the elder. “He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.'"

The toxicity of compassion is this: that you begin to see your vocation as to fix, rather than to heal.

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Nothing is more wounding than to take away someone’s self-respect, their dignity. It is to impose upon the afflicted something very cruel, almost incomprehensibly so.

The Holy Qur'an admonishes us to give charity freely, without bitterness and without fear (Q 2:262-269): 

"Those who spend their wealth in God’s cause are like grains of corn that produce seven ears, each bearing a hundred grains. God gives multiple increase to whoever He wishes: He is limitless and all knowing. 

Those who spend their wealth in God’s cause, and do not follow their spending with reminders of their benevolence or hurtful words, will have their rewards with their Lord: no fear for them, nor will they grieve.

A kind word and forgiveness is better than a charitable deed followed by hurtful [words]: God is self-sufficient, forbearing.

You who believe, do not cancel out your charitable deeds with reminders and hurtful words, like someone who spends his wealth only to be seen by people, not believing in God and the Last Day. Such a person is like a rock with earth on it: heavy rain falls and leaves it completely bare. Such people get no rewards for their works: God does not guide the disbelievers.

But those who spend their wealth in order to gain God’s approval, and as an affirmation of their own faith, are like a garden on a hill: heavy rain falls and it produces double its normal yield; even if no heavy rain falls, it will still be watered by the dew. God sees all that you do.

Would any of you like to have a garden of palm trees and vines, graced with flowing streams and all kinds of produce, which, when you are afflicted with old age and feeble offspring, is struck by a fiery whirlwind and burnt down? In this way God makes His messages clear to you, so that you may reflect on them.

You who believe, give charitably from the good things you have acquired and that We have produced for you from the earth. Do not give away the bad things that you yourself would only accept with your eyes closed: remember that God is self-sufficient, worthy of all praise.

Satan threatens you with the prospect of poverty and commands you to do foul deeds; God promises you His forgiveness and His abundance: God is limitless and all knowing, and He gives wisdom to whoever He will. Whoever is given wisdom has truly been given much good, but only those with insight bear this in mind.”

The fear of poverty is not just that we will become poor, but the realisation of our existential poverty: our lack of control over our future. The sight of the afflicted reminds us of our own weakness. This could be us: this is us. We are all the same: the seed is within you as it is within me. The terror of meaningless affliction seizes our souls. We become unable to respond. We must possess. We must control. We must fix their illness; if we do not, then who will fix ours?  Simone Weil said of charity: 

"It is not astonishing when someone who has bread would give a morsel of it to a hungry person. What is astonishing is when we are able to do so with a different gesture than we use when buying an object. Almsgiving, when it is not supernatural, seems like a sort of purchase. It buys the afflicted."

We do much to avoid encountering our selves in our weakness. We will pity, we will ignore, we will manipulate, we will struggle, we will research and apply, we will make the most noble goals of fixing it all. 

But then comes the real patient, and she frustrates it all. She refuses to get fixed. She actively works against it. She simpers and smirks and lies and does not comply. Nothing is worse than the non-compliant. She wants but she will not do.

We will fix her, but if she will not get fixed, if she refuses to get fixed, then we will hate her. We hate her, and everyone like her, because they are all us.

Actively loving a patient is difficult. There is their ingratitude, but also their indifference. But you are not performing mere labour; you are healing someone. It does not flow from your hands, but from God. The afflicted must consent to your healing. Their bodies are not objects of study upon which you have any right. But more than that, their consent will be imperfect. It will be incomplete and inconsistent. But it does not matter. They have offered you themselves so that you may fulfill your vocation. The person who helps you fulfill your calling is worthy of your gratitude.

I do not know how to solve the problem of the dark side of compassion, except to not to lie to oneself and to not live in dreams of self-grandeur. One must not see herself as God, healing all, but attend only to the afflicted and to the centre of their personality, until the repulsion becomes gratitude, until it is not your hands but God’s Hands that touch upon their aching bodies, not your eyes but God’s eyes that look upon their wearied souls.

(image taken by Dolores Kiriacon)