Sympathy, Compassion, and Possibly Enlightened Self-Interest

Buddhist thought is all about compassion for other living beings. What is the root of this, and does it make sense when we bring as much scientific and logical analysis to the issue as possible? Before beginning, let’s define some terms.

What is the difference between sympathy and compassion? Both cause one person to want to mitigate the problems of another. But they work in different ways. Sympathy means that we sympathize with the other person, we share his feelings. This is the key point. A person’s brain may have in it memories of similar occurrences to what the second person is enduring, whether it be pain, loss, anxiety or grief. The sight, sound or learning about the second person’s phenomena causes a flood of emotional feeling to occur – we sympathize, we feel his/her feeling. This emotion causes us to want to stop it, and to do so, we help the second person.

Cynically, we could flee the situation, but memory being what it is, that may not clear up the problem.

Sympathy, then, is an emotional hook caused by pattern matching of bad experiences.

Compassion, on the other hand, is the feeling of wanting to help, not because the person is feeling the unhappiness of the second person, but because of a transference of responsibility. It is an adoption of the second person as a brother/sister or close friend. Human brains are designed by evolution to help their children and relatives out of problem situations. Some stranger doesn’t qualify, but the connection that we feel that drives us to want to help our kin slips a gear, and causes us to want to help some other person. It is an evocation of the paternal/maternal feelings that lie at the bottom of our brains (the part we have left over from other species that rear their young).

So, compassion and sympathy are both pattern-matching errors in the brain, but that certainly doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be encouraged.

The third reason we often have that makes us want to help others is self-interest, which may be “enlightened” or not. Exactly what enlightened means is not clear, but I think it means the quid pro quo isn’t obvious. Self-interest in the lowest form means that we help someone because we’ll get something for it. Enlightened self-interest means we go around helping people because through the diffuse processes of social interaction, someone will help us, or something beneficial will happen, if lots of people go around helping others.

So, when SGI Buddhist leaders tell us to chant for the benefit of others, which of these four motivations is being summoned? My instinct is that it is the last of the four, enlightened self-interest. SGI concentrates on the happiness of individuals during their lifetime. To be happy, we need an environment where happiness is both possible and reasonably easily achievable. This means that the social feedback loops that make helping others lead to others helping us have to be strong. Many times, as evidenced by the experiences cited in World Tribune and at discussion meetings, individuals report that they took it on themselves or were counseled by senior leaders to chant for the happiness of someone who was causing them difficulties, such as an irritating boss. The idea, and often the outcome, is that the boss would get happier and stop being so irritating. Alternately, the idea might be that the behavior that the person was doing that was annoying the boss would get reduced, and the irritation would subside following that. Either way, the feedback loop only has one other person in it.

The most gigantic feedback loop is the SGI goal of world peace. We work for individual happiness in the hope and expectation that world peace will result. Exactly how this will work is never made clear, but the intuition is that if everybody is happy no one will be willing to go to war. I think this is a beautiful idea, and I hope it works.