I know I said I was going to write a post about weakness, but this topic struck me more today.
I was listening to Prison Sex by Tool and my mind began to meander off in a direction, I began to think about the suffering of the perpetrators. I began thinking about the suffering that being a perpetrator of “bad things” might cause someone, as well as the suffering that might lead there. Then I heard in my head an echo of a sentiment, something like “I d0n’t give a fuck how much he suffers! WHO fucking cares! Look what he has done!”, something to that effect, and it got me thinking.
Why the vi0lent reaction against empathy for “evildoers”. For the rapists, the murderers, the pedophiles. Why the horror. Against merely, internally feeling the pain of those who are “beyond the pale”? We don’t have to help them to empathise, we don’t have to pardon them, we don’t have to give them even the satisfaction of knowing that we feel their pain. The reaction is not against the threat of pardoning the murderer, the rapist, the SUV driver, it’s not against the threat of normalising the behavior of the Jihadist, the racist, the child molester. It’s against the sympathy itself, more than that, it’s against recognising in them any suffering that is alike our own.
We can recognise their suffering in a self righteous “I do pity them, they’ll never be happy” wishing upon them further ill kind of way. But never in a way that realises the tragedy of it really, because tragedy implies humanity. No, tragedy implies that the roles could be reversed. That, “there but for the grace of God go I”. That evil is not something restricted to the other, but something that could strike in our hearts as well as theirs.
Evil strikes in our hearts all the time. That’s the real tragedy. We are all rapists, murderers, nixon voters, communists, islamists. That is where the fear comes from. To empathise with evil, we must realise the depth of evil inside ourselves.
But it’s not just that. There is also, the scarcity of attention. We can only think about so many things, only care about so many things, only love so much, only feel so much, before we are scattered, exhausted, jaded. There is the very real, very valid fear, that “if I care about the guilty, I will have no compassion left for the innocent”.
But where to draw the line? Who is innocent? Who is without sin?
And beyond that, even if our attention is scarce, for everyone we attend to and reject their suffering as inhumane, we seal off a part of our heart from the capacity to love, and its not long before we have no access to any of it.
