Thursday, June 5, 2008

Building compassion/public service nightmares

For people to be compassionate they have to be able to feel what some other person is feeling. For them to care about others pain they have to either have felt that pain also or had it well described and spent some time thinking about it.

In this world most people like to avoid thinking about negative things. Only a warped minority really will willingly face very negative things.

So in a society that was trying to promote compassion in all it's people you could have "public service nightmares". Where people simply Have to watch some horrible stuff. They simply have to subject themselves to seeing suffering and learning to truly understand it.

Somewhat similar is (in a more coherent and systematic way than is practiced in reality) simply reading stories where there are bad guys and good guys. Where these stories can be related to the real world. Where people can then recognize in their potential being that bad guy and not wanting to be that. Instead we have people who don't read, who somehow have avoided most of the movies, etc that would be of use. Who are ridiculous caricatures of "evil" and have no idea.

This kind of stuff:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-8U_Etj0wNo
is of positive use in this world.

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