Given power in civil society is an added stress and loving kindness makes it a kind of torture in itself. For example, a surgeon or medical doctor learns what causes pain in his or her patients. A prison guard is expected to keep people in their cages. A drug dealer sells a different kind of prison to his customers. Strategists plan the destruction and killing of people they haven't met.
When you look at it deeply, politics and business demands a separation from emotion, sympathy, compassion — for the sake of profit. We call it rationality. Winning the profit margin means selfishly planning your days around meeting your goal, getting more, convincing others to give you what you want, paying attention to how you look, what you wear, how you sound and smell.
According to brain development a crocodile doesn't have the capacity to feel pity towards the food it eats as it rips the flesh of its meal. But humans are born with the capacity to consider the pain of a fish with a hook through its face.
Empathy comes early in the life of a human unless it is shut out — consciously or unconsciously. Any animal that gives birth must care for its young by caring what happens to it and is given the "gift of stress" along with brain development.
In civilization, social practices either nurture the awareness of empathy or cut it off. A society run by those who have no connection to caring for others, tends to design its business to separate us from our natural empathic brain signals.
Big business (not small proprietor owned storefronts), including politics, is run mostly by those who have succeeded or who never developed the capacity to feel connection to another, to feel their pain, or to observe the face of grief. They are called psychopaths or sociopaths. Their brains are wired to bypass concerns or feelings for others.
What pain does it cause a CEO to cut thousands of jobs in the country they live, in order to plan more profit, and to keep doing it because it's his or her job to do that? When does the signalling for success get turned off?
Examples of dead fascists like Stalin and Hitler reveal millions of deaths are not enough to satisfy. Slave owners willingly organized public displays of brutality to make their point.
Business demands that its practitioners cut off their senses if the only thing that registers, the only feedback, is a number on the bottom line. Pressure wipes out whatever your brain measures in order to take it back to the reptile.
You cannot see or feel what you're doing to the planet, to your children, to your pets, or even your property — you must consistently keep your mind occupied on that fraction of who you are in order to play the game. Act faster, be more cruel, more alienated, lonely and ultimately swallow that learned contempt on yourself as you do to all life.
At what point would you feel the loving kindness you once possessed? How far back would you have to go to call on that?
Loving kindness may be an ethic discussed in various religions or beliefs, but it's part of human capacity and could save our lives.
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