Lacking Compassion, is there another way?

Measuring the Outcome

Mediation and Arbitration

Measuring the Outcome. Through the ages, many have negotiated deals that were worth good profit because they gave away something that the other party wanted and was willing to pay a price to acquire. Until money dominated commerce, buyers and sellers had a culture that allowed for barter, which is dickering about the comparative worth of two commodities. True, it was awkward to carry a sheep around or three bales of timothy hay, but everyone was in on setting the price. Those were the good old days. Today, a customer pays a price set by the seller. It is uncommon to dicker about dollars unless one is engaged in stocks, bonds and commodities – which is limited to those who do not need to barter for basic necessities. If a farmer wanted to sell a sheep on the open market today, much of the profit is already taken by a commodities trader who may never have seen a sheep.

It used to be that business and labor would sit down and dicker, each side knowing the financial status of the company. In one example, the business negotiating team was under severe orders not to grant more than a two cent per hour raise. The labor negotiating team had its members clamoring for ten cents an hour. After three weeks at the negotiating table, the final result was: the union received a two cent raise. However, labor also received a four-week vacation instead of two and was allowed to accumulate sick leave. The solution was a two cent raise to please the bosses and the equivalent of a ten cent raise for the union members. It’s all in how one measures things. There is no doubt the process improved oneness in the company.

Measuring the outcome requires that two elements be in place: those involved are using the same measuring stick – one of the big reasons money became a standard; the other is respect for the measuring process. With these two items in place, it is possible to reconcile differences even if there is no compassion. It may not be easy but it can be done.

In recent years, airline companies have received a bad reputation because some airlines did not want to measure the outcome with the union’s help. Some airlines declared bankruptcy, which negated labor contracts that were in place. Weeks later, when the bankruptcy court agreed to a method for emerging from bankruptcy, the employees were at the mercy of the airline if they wanted to keep their jobs. This is an example of not agreeing about how to measure outcomes. Another failure to use the same measures for outcome led to heated reactions by US citizenry when in 2008 banks that caused a severe recession were not allowed to fail and the citizenry was furious when large bonuses were paid to bank traders. Behind the scenes, the Federal Government and the banks were dickering and making deals about who would fail and who would pay fines. The Government actually ended up owning bank stock as a guarantee. For lack of agreed measuring, this situation is still unresolved in the citizens’ minds six years later.

Mediation and arbitration are controlled dickering. This is accomplished by using a third party to oversee the negotiation. A good example is when Egypt attempted to mediate a compromise between Gaza and Israel. The mediation will not work for two reasons: neither Gaza (Hamas) nor Israel want to use the same values by which to measure the outcome; neither Gaza nor Israel perceive a greater reality. Oneness, even by an uncompassionate process, is out of the question.

Having an arbiter or judge decide the outcome of a conflict inevitably leaves one party or the other, or both parties, unsatisfied. Granted there are times when two parties will never accept a common measure of outcome; neither will accept the arbiter’s measure of outcome. While forcing a conclusion to an unstable situation, the difficulty with mediation and arbitration is that the methods generally do not build oneness.

Conflicts that find themselves in court inevitably enter a win-lose environment. While negotiation may take place within the court process, the win-lose environment remains. Constricted by legal procedures, empathy and compassion are not players. One may make the case that courts expedite irresolvable situations, for example divorce or property conflicts. Still, these arrangements are self serving and do not encourage the union of lesser and greater realities based on compassion and oneness.

The question: You may be familiar with this situation and may already know the act of compassion. You and a friend have one doughnut to share. What is the best procedure to assure the doughnut is equally shared? Think about your combined feelings of trust and fairness that were necessary. Which feeling was stronger?

Ancient Mariner

ONENESS – IV

Which lesser reality?

Which greater reality?

One need think only a moment before a conflict comes to mind: How does one select the appropriate lesser solution? The reader is reminded at this point that empathy is a tool with which to make the best decision. In the example of the owner of a small business, the owner actually has several options: Layoff? Sell the business? Go into debt? Restructure the business in a way that maximizes short term profit? How does one select a lesser solution that maximizes the opportunity to select a correct greater solution?

This is no easy consideration as any individual will attest. In the example, consideration begins deep in the philosophy of the owner. Is profit, his religion, his character, the definition of who he is? Is his measure of personal worth his obligation to others – if only to his kind or his business? Is his measure compassion? Have we come to a root that solves the dilemma? Is it the act of compassion?

Compassion deserves further investigation. It is not a strong objective in global awareness. The link between lesser and greater realities almost always is a compassionate consideration and suffers mightily from self interest and the predatory nature of the human species.

If one examines prejudicial behavior, particularly racism and religious prejudice, the smaller situation is a matter of conditioning rather than thoughtful consideration. Racist and religious behavior may be inculcated by parents. Perhaps peer pressure is the source of prejudice. It may be that people of color simply are a scapegoat for personal feelings of inadequacy. Confronted with an interracial or religious situation, how does the person find empathy required to select the appropriate lesser reality? Even if they found empathy, could they select the greater reality?

Many years ago, the mariner had a conversation with a racist man. His position was that African Americans, Latinos and Chinese all looked different than he did and, conversely, he looked different to them. This turned out to be a telling point. “What,” he said, “if they became the majority of the population? I would no longer be part of the majority and my normal white privileges would disappear.”

Is this man able to find sympathy or to act with compassion involving nonwhite individuals? If so, it will take a mighty wind of change.

Prejudice is not limited to race or religion. The author knows a number of individuals who are so opposed to smoking that friends and events first must be tobacco free. Then more compassionate behavior may arise. Confronted with a situation involving tobacco, how does the individual select the correct reality which will link to a greater, compassionate reality?

One solution is to ignore that which is offensive. It takes practice to hone one’s mind to accept the person first – despite the automatic rejections of race, alcoholism, smoking, or whether a person is neat and clean, has a job or makes as much money such that the person is a credible member of the human race. The 2012 presidential race caught candidate Romney admitting that forty-seven percent of the US population depended on government handouts. It was spoken with derision and contempt. Where was the seed of empathy that is necessary to link a lesser and greater reality? Without empathy, Romney was unable to perceive the dependency of banks and industries on government handouts, tax breaks and loopholes. The woes of a beaten middle class would not be an element of reconciliation between lesser and greater realities. There is no act of compassion. To Romney and the attendees in that room, people are Matrix batteries.

Science has a theory that all things in the universe are entropic. The mariner suggests that oneness can induce growth, depending on oneness as part of a resolution. In other words, an act of compassion expands orderliness, consciousness, and discovery while negative acts accelerate entropy.

The question: Pick one of the people you know that you have difficulty relating to because of your opinion of that person. Imagine that person without letting your opinion affect you. This takes a lot of practice. You know you are doing the right thing if you can feel a growing empathy. This is an exercise coined in the phrase “walk a mile in his shoes.” What are the good characteristics that you noticed? Can you separate your smaller situation and the person’s larger situation enough to reconcile the difference? What act of compassion will be required?

Ancient Mariner

ONENESS III

Oneness is overwhelmed

All religions have language that relates to morality and godliness. These words have been a mainstay for billions of people since the Egyptian pyramids were built. Slowly, exceptional writings were gathered to capture the wisdom of good works – works that improved a situation for all concerned but also improved reality in general, works that over time would sustain an ameliorative society. Ritual and theological differences aside, these works are the foundation of oneness. Often, however, these works lack the nature of a how-to book; how to get from slot A to Tab A may not be clear.

Throughout history, there are times when society suffers a wrenching change in values. These changes are caused by dramatic transitions in population, invention, and discovery that turn society topsy-turvy. Quick examples are gunpowder, the wheel, the sail, automobiles, airplanes, steam, nationalist conflict, television, financial opportunism, and the Internet. Today, the pressures of change erupt in every quarter from what to eat, to communications, to starving masses, to obsolete national boundaries to oligarchy – both governmental and corporate and exposure to unending wars around the globe.

Unlike the past, however, the eruption is world-wide. No country is exempt from global opportunism, global warming, global population growth and shrinking global resources of which physical space is one. Many countries still live by cultures created many centuries ago. Many countries are artificial – carved by war and politics instead of natural social development. Many still live primitively in deep jungles or on distant islands. All will feel the eruption of the twenty-first century. Our technological capabilities expose us to global awareness that overwhelms our personal, every day values.

Increasingly visible is the global reorganization of super powers and global economic contests – if not wars. The challenge is to find something that will work on any scale. By nature, oneness is personal. Can oneness become global?

Oneness is at the mercy of circumstance. One cannot mandate that selfishness is not permitted; one cannot use force to reduce forceful behavior; one cannot deny greed by redistribution of ill-gotten gains.

Alexander McCall Smith has written a series of books centered on the character Isabel Dalhousie. Dalhousie is a detective prone to philosophical thoughts. In The Careful Use of Compliments[1], there is a passage related to the examination of community oneness:

“Cat went off to prepare Isabel’s lunch, leaving her with The Guardian. She was reading an article on the Middle East and the prospects for peace, which were slim. What acres of newsprint, she thought, what lakes of ink, had been expended on that topic; and always it came back to the same thing, the sense of difference between people, the erection of barriers of religion, clothing, culture. And yet there were differences and it was naïve to imagine that people were all the same – they weren’t. And everybody needed space, physical space, to live their lives amongst those with whom they shared an outlook and values; which led to the depressing conclusion that the recipe for social justice was keeping people separate from one another, each in his own territory, each in the safety of fellows….The problem was that we could no longer have our own cultural spaces; everybody was now too mixed up for that and we had to share.”

Dalhousie makes the case for geographical space, common cultural values and common future and laments that, in the Middle East and across the planet that neighborhoods, geographical and economic groupings of people largely has collapsed as a natural environment. This makes it more difficult for oneness to flourish because of the clash of values and the competition for space and assets.

There are scant few efforts to create “whole town” cultures. Whole towns would be like the old days when a town had everything it needed including retail, medical, recreational and job opportunities. One notable example of trying to build an integrated town culture is the environment at Microsoft Corporation where there are facilities for babysitting, a fitness center, recreation, opportunity to bring the family for a day or two, a 24-hour restaurant and a work schedule that allows for frequent free time on the Microsoft campus. Microsoft has listened to sociologists who suggest Microsoft will experience more creativity, team effort and commitment to Microsoft if a town atmosphere were maintained.

A developer in Florida has designed neighborhoods with all the facilities a town would need and automobiles must be left at an external parking lot. Everything in the town is within walking or bicycle distance.

How do we recreate a town experience based on common geography, culture and viable economy? Any positive social changes made throughout man’s long history were made by only three processes that are effective.

The first is cause and effect. There is a direct correlation between behavior and a directly related outcome. The Microsoft solution is an example of cause and effect. The Ukrainian conflict also is an example of cause and effect. The second is crisis. Survival of the participants at hand can only survive if everyone survives. The Katrina Hurricane threatened tens of thousands of citizens and required a national response. The third is persuasion. Enough influence is applied to alter behavior.

Unfortunately, many issues cover all three, global warming among them. Allowed to continue with uncontrolled fossil fuel consumption, it is a race to see whether fossil fuels are depleted first or Earth becomes uninhabitable. It is likely that the world will approach a crisis that cannot be reversed and damage will be permanent. If the oceans rise nine feet as predicted, Florida will be a much smaller state. Persuasion will never be more tested as a process than when it disrupts global industries and shifts political power between nations.

Cause and effect can be mitigated by regulations and new profit models. When President Eisenhower authorized the Interstate highway system, trains lost their lock on interstate shipping. Trucking and especially big oil evolved quickly. Can regulations be created to move entrepreneurs to non fossil fuel solutions? Many palms in many governments may need to be greased. Many new international obligations must take place.

Crisis is not a deliberate circumstance. It is an act of nature similar to a plague or disruptive weather; it is a byproduct of war; it is an unintended collapse of an economy; a crisis can be personal as well when health and finances suddenly change. A crisis is so invasive that survival becomes the primary motivation and disrupts existing processes.

Persuasion has many forms: cajoling, payoff, rebellion and voting are examples. Each of these processes requires participation of a substantial population to affect culture. Persuasion can be as small as a sentence or two. As today’s American citizens look back in history, it is hard to believe that women could not vote until 1920 – and only then because of a persuasion that began in 1854!

There is one persuasion not mentioned that is important. It is persuasion by example. In the Christian New Testament, there is a popular story told by Jesus about a Samaritan. Samaritans were Jewish in faith but were considered outcasts by the Hebrew nation because Samaritans had mixed blood with Arabs. Nevertheless, a Samaritan comes across a beaten and robbed Jew. Despite the Samaritan’s awareness that the Jew holds him in disdain, he puts the Jew on his donkey, takes him to an inn and pays his expenses. By example, the Samaritan set a standard for oneness. Each reader easily can find moments where they can set an example that increases oneness.

War and forceful incursion do not lead to oneness; they do not consider the greater reality that affects the lives and cultural stability of the enemy. Similarly, corporations can disrupt stable communities by locating large operations without considering the greater situation of the community. Examples are coal mines, Walmart, and other numerous vertical corporations that eliminate community economies, for example Monsanto and hoof-to-store livestock operations.

Typically, oneness is not a goal in decision making today. Profit seems to be the goal in decision making. Profit is not intrinsically bad unless it forgets to reconcile with the greater reality of community.

The question: Relive a moment when you did something that made you feel you had helped someone in a direct way. Relive a moment when you felt you were at great risk along with other people but together the risk was reduced. Relive a moment when you persuaded someone to change their judgment about something. Did these experiences involve an act of compassion? Was oneness accomplished in each situation?

Ancient Mariner

¹The Careful Use of Compliments, Alexander McCall Smith, Pantheon Books 2007, ISBN 978-0-375-42301-7