Doing What is Good
In a previous article ("The Nature of Reality" - see link on the right), I pointed out that you should be careful what you wish for as, if you get it, it may turn out to have severe repercussions. There's a host of fairy stories on this theme - people who get a wish granted by a Jinn only find that it turns out bad for them. The corollary of this is that what you want may not be what you need. This is in total opposition to Western thinking. Capitalism is based on giving people what they want (and persuading them to want what you want to sell them). Charity, however, is concerned with giving people who don't have what they want, what they want. Ironically capitalism and its apparent opposite, charity, are two sides of the same coin. This is a result of the narrowness of Western thinking.
There's a term 'do-gooding', which annoys those concerned with charity. Of course they do good. However, doing good is giving people what they want, not what they need.
So if we don't give people what they want, how are we to determine what is the correct thing to do? Well realising that what people want may be not what's best for them is the first step, as it opens our minds up to new possibilities. As an example, the one thing a drug addict needs is to come off drugs, but the 'do-gooders' are concerned with giving drug addicts an ample supply of the very substance that is killing them.
To understand what people need you have to walk a mile in their shoes, so to speak. To see the world from their point of view. This used to be called 'empathy' or 'compassion' but these words are now not taken to mean feeling but acting. Governments are called 'compassionate' if they give poor people government money. The church talks about compassion when they mean giving people money, or shelter. They are not talking about feeling. The assumption is that if you feel for someone you want to do something about their plight, and this action is taken as 'proof' that you have feeling. This is symptomatic of Western thinking again. When people get hungry the hunger must be satiated. When there is a sexual desire, it must be relieved. Similarly, if you feel compassion for someone's situation then you have to do something to resolve it. The action is not taken out of compassion for the other person but to relieve your own feeling. Of course, this assumes that you did actually feel anything. More often than not there's no real feeling for other people and actions are taken as compensation, as if to say 'see how much I'm doing? It proves how much I feel'.
You should be able to feel for others but in a detached way. You should be able to view a film of tribes in Africa who have been engulfed in war for years; racked with poverty whilst their children die of hunger and disease or leave to fight in the army, as if you yourself had lived that life. That's real compassion. But having felt that, you stay detached and leave them to their own end knowing that whatever you do is not going to help the situation.
People want to 'help' others in order to feel good. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
