Compassion: A Weapon of Peace

If there are no absolute truths, then there are only feelings that come closest to the truth.

In this sense, compassion is the only true feeling.

And even if there are things that are perceived as absolute truths, like God or souls, there are plenty who don’t believe in them.

Is it an absolute truth if there are those who don’t believe in it? Or are nonbelievers simply “wrong”?

And beyond this wrinkle, there is postmodernism, which states that, despite what someone does or says, we can never know what is in that person’s heart. So what they state as an absolute truth may be a fabrication, a demagoguery, a delusion, or simply a mistake.

Regardless of which of these contingencies prevails, it stands to reason that the “truer” truth is the one we can all experience.

That is, hunger is a greater truth than God. Pain is a greater truth than the soul, and love than heaven or eternity.

God, souls, and heaven all require a degree of belief in order to exist. They cannot be extrinsically verified; they oppose proof, logic, and reason. Such things are objects of faith.

Is the more absolute truth the one that must be believed in? Or the one that doesn’t? The one that is proved, shared, collectively feared or resisted, collectively sought after, because it is common to all consciousness?

I say the truest truths do not require belief. As Osho says, belief is a mask for uncertainty.

Hence it is not anything that requires belief that is the truest of the true. The truest of the true is that which requires action. It is a need; it is not the luxury of belief. It is the raw, painful, thrusting, inescapable jab of necessity.

If necessity is the truth, what do I know? I know that I need, and I know, with a higher degree of certainty than I know of God’s existence, that you need. I don’t know exactly what you need, but I know you need, for as Prince Feisal says, “No man needs nothing.”

The denial of need is the vain denial of our own humanity. We wish to be free of our slobbish, slimy, gleaming, snot-coated entry into this world, our absolute need for a parent or guardian’s care. We wish to exist above and beyond the animals, for whom life consists of digging in the dirt for acorns, rutting in filth, resisting the elements with coats of fur or layers of scales, and avoiding predators whose place in nature is inescapably above our own.

We do not even seek to be the predators; we seek to be the supreme, the ultimate, the perfect, the godly, above all ordinary needs, ordained to rule from on high with full discretion on wrath or mercy, life or death, over all the twisting, grunting, grime-coated underlings wallowing on the mortal earth beneath us, whose purpose is to lie prostrate at our feet and invite the fate that we have chosen for them.

This is, of course, a fantasy. And not of the harmless type; taken to its extreme, it is the source of all man’s wasted potential, all of his greatest hopes given way to delusions of grandeur and structures of misplaced hate for what is viewed as inferior.

For in this scenario, the absolute truth is power.

But at the end of one’s life, what happens to that power? What is it compared to nature, compared to the turning of the earth around the sun?

Nothing.

What kind of truth is that? And how is he remembered?

As a conqueror, a killer, a crusher, a bandit, a bully, a thug, a predator….a human who used his human intelligence as a means to animalistic ends, and died by them.

My premise is not that compassion is an absolute truth, or that it exists after you die. Nothing exists after we die; nothing is left. Our memory is finite among those who knew us, good or bad. For some day, humanity will end, and with it, all memory.

Rather, my premise is that compassion is the closest we can get to absolute truth, because I know, with a great deal of certainty, that you hunger.

You thirst.

You fear.

You get cold.

You hate.

You love.

You wish.

In short, you need.

“No man needs nothing.” That includes compassion.

Compassion is not a need. Compassion is an understanding of need. A mother can breastfeed a child without compassion. But most mothers do it with the strongest of all compassions:

The child’s need is now her need.

It is only when men embrace compassion that we unleash our true potential: our potential to change the world for the better, to bring about the kind of truth that we seek—the universal, the admirable, the lasting—through cooperation and collaboration, the engaging of minds and hearts and creativity and hope on things that bring more people into the fold, that engage and apply to and include all needs, so that no potential goes wasted.

The power-worshipper would say, “why does our society protect the weak?” He disparages what are called democracies, and longs for Spartan days of infanticide upon hearing a wheeze in an infant’s tiny lung.

Yet what if that infant, upon reaching adulthood, had invented the next weapon of war from his desk chair, thereby allowing his society to win against invaders? Or, more likely, being infirm and understanding pain and frustrated ambitions, if he had invented a “weapon of peace,” allowing his society to win the war over itself, over those that would have taken his life?

What is a weapon of peace? Formations of compassion, that allow one man to stand up for another, that allow him to see something more in someone else and to both encourage it and learn from it. And that, because it believes in him, he might even be willing to die for.

An army of compassion is an unstoppable force against all that’s wrong in the world.

The soldiers of power realize the falseness of the god they worship, that it is a false, amorphous god with no qualities but what it needs in the moment. And when it abandons him, he is at a loss.

He understood himself only as he related to power. When power abandons him, as it always does once his usefulness has expired, he has lost his understanding of himself. Now, he actively resists that understanding—of his own needs, his own feelings—because were he to try, they would reveal to him that he had been fooled, bamboozled, taken for a ride, used, abused, and tossed aside.

Like a fool. Like a victim. Like the weakling that he abhors, by the master he adored.

Confusion and panic reign, driving him to do dishonorable things of which he once accused his enemy, and felt himself incapable. Envy, self-pity, delusion, cognitive dissonance, entitlement, and any number of other mechanisms of rejection take root in his mind to protect him from the truth his heart would tell him, and make him safely immune to it.

Those who fight for compassion will never yield against him, because they also fight for him, for the heart of their enemy. They feel compassion toward him and toward his loss, his pain, his confusion, the bubble in which he lives where no one and nothing else may enter: no love, no hope, no joy, no needs fulfilled or even recognized.

The power-worshipper is blinded by hate and informed by the lies of prejudice, staggering towards a foolish and empty demise, unloved, unknown, and unremembered.

He would bring the walls of the world down around him and around all of us, and end humanity even before nature, as if on its behalf.

But once he can accept his need and be alone with it, once he can withstand his questioning thoughts, this fearful chatter….once he can be human, he can find that human truth that places him on the right side of history, the side that is not destined to win—for no side is—but which must, if we are to have any hope of living long enough to witness our own evolution.

The compassionate man is the New Man, in touch with the spirit of the unknown but armed with knowledge: of himself and his comrades, and all that needs to be done.