The Second Brahma Vihara practice, karuna, is
Some of us said they couldn't imagine having compassion for certain types of people. This is my understanding of why we need to work for compassion for everyone.
The reason for compassion toward people who do terrible things is that they did them from a failure of compassion toward the people who first did terrible things to them.
If I can’t have compassion for someone, I tend to blame them — seeing no responsibility for the tragedy anywhere else— perhaps even demonize them — seeing them as wholly evil. Then I can level retribution at them safely without seeing that I in turn am acting hurtfully/with violence/evilly, projecting my fears onto them and exorcising them by “punishing” my victim. This is the vicious circle that is responsible for war.
When a child is hurt in this way, it is worse, for it is harder for the child to come to terms with how the world has failed to nurture. Adults teach the child to ignore, suppress and deny the reality, with the result that the wounds fester in the unconscious, hurting the child’s self-esteem and grasp of reality. When such victims finally find their own victims, the damage they wreak is worse than the damage from people who had nurturing childhoods.
Compassion doesn’t mean we avoid appropriate action toward a perpetrator. And it doesn’t necessarily mean we are not angry at or fearful of such evil. But it does mean we grieve for the fact that anyone is ever hurt in this way, and it means we try to act in such a way as to stop the vicious circle.
Alice Miller has written extensively on this vicious circle and its prevalence in our culture. <i> For Your Own Good</i> is a good book to start with.
12 March 2004