Of all that I have learned, the most important lesson was how much a human can suffer. When I was twenty five I wound up in the hospital for three months. I spent days screaming, in so much pain that morphine couldn’t handle it. For about a month I couldn’t move enough to even pull myself up in bed without crippling agony. Later my body decided that every foreign substance was an enemy, and when I was given IV antibiotics, every four hours, I’d spend the next twenty minutes dry heaving, since I couldn’t eat or drink and had nothing to bring up.
It turned out I was one of those people who get psychotic episodes from high doses of steroids. One episode was so bad, prior to hospitalization, that I promised myself I’d commit suicide if it didn’t end in twelve hours.
Strangely, as much physical pain as I experienced, the bad psychotic episodes were worse.
After I got out, I had about a period of about a year where I’d wake up every morning with the muscles in my lower back extraordinarily tight, and the least movement would make them seize up: both painful and crippling. I once ate breakfast at a restaurant standing up because I knew if I sat down I wouldn’t be able to get back up. Another time fire fighters had to break down my door and take me to the hospital: I couldn’t get out of bed.
It took me years to recover, and the recovery was never complete. I never regained the easy athleticism of my teens and early twenties: I had been a serious runner and a gymnast, and I loved both and I never got that back.
This isn’t primarily “woe me.” It was terrible, but others have had it worse, though I certainly had my bouts of self-pity.
What I learned was that the human capacity to suffer is damn near endless. It’s way beyond anything which could be considered “useful for survival” since at a certain point it becomes crippling.
I also learned, not only from my own experiences, but from watching others, that it has nothing to do with “deserve.” The worst people in the world often have really good lives. Kissinger is a good example, but there are many, many others.
The human body and mind are capable of experiencing Hell for very long periods. The same, I am sure, is true of animal bodies and there’s evidence coming in this is probably true of many plants, including trees.
This isn’t to deny that life can be good or even great. I’ve experienced some of that end of experience as well: both physically when a young athlete and in the past ten years as a result of meditation and cultivation.
And I’ve been in love and that was marvelous.
But, bottom line, life can be Hell and most of us will experience it at some point in our lives. No one deserves the worst suffering: I wouldn’t inflict on Hitler the worst of what I’ve gone thru, and suffering appears to make people worse, not better, somewhat more often than it ennobles them. Suffering can lead good places, but it isn’t necessary, and the worst suffering is largely pointless.
In all of this all we have is each other. We can decide to be predators, to prey on those who are suffering or weak and to not give a damn. We can rape and torture and steal from the weak. We can hoard resources so that those who need them most don’t have them, and enjoy the luxuries and pleasures of wealth.
Or we can decide to be kind and to look after each other. At least when I was sick and in hospital I had free health care and doctors and nurses and orderlies who were trying to help. (Had one who was trying to hurt, too, but he was a minority of one.)
There is so much suffering in the world, and so much hoarded wealth and deliberate cruelty. So many humans, especially powerful humans, making the suffering worse or hoarding and accumulating wealth which could help others.
And beyond alleviating suffering, we could help each other be happy and joyous.
No one is going to help us but us. The route out of Hell, the route to making Earth less hellish, not just for us but for the others who are also here, is simple kindness at scale. Only we can make life worth living: not just alleviate suffering but make it fun and great for each other.
Alone we are weak, together we are immensely strong. We can decide to use that strength in service to each other, to make the world so much less a Hell and so much more a Heaven.
And really, that’s my only wish for us.
Paul Harris
Psychopaths don’t decide to be cruel and can’t decide to be kind. It’s not a choice for them. We need to root them and expel them from civilisation. Exclude them.
someofparts
As a citizen of the great Satan, I have spent my life thinking that his dreadful illness made our finest President, FDR, more noble and humane. I don’t know what you were like before your illness (besides healthy), but my off-the-cuff sense of things is that your suffering has made you wiser and more noble, as it did my favorite President.
Raad
Excellent stuff Ian, helps a lot 🙂
Krystyn
Wonderful piece. A question I keep asking myself lately is “How can I be more like Christ?” (Not how can I be a better Christian…)
My suffering, I can say, has been worse than yours. Currently homeless living in a minivan, on permanent disability with an Immunodeficiency and Schizoaffective Disorder (I get psychotic episodes from steroids as well). I am grateful for the assistance from others through my Disability payments.
Meanwhile my nephew just bought a house in Brooklyn(!) and teaches “mindfulness and compassionate communication” to the elites out in the Hamptons and has never once asked if I needed help. My family as well decided my mental illness was too much to bother with and my sister decided to buy a second house on the beach. My family are sociopaths by training, like most of the world. The sociopaths run the world and most people aim to be just like them. Not me.
Even homeless I refuse to placate my suffering with drugs so I do not understand why people feel that my mental illness makes me so untouchable. Never hurt a fly, never been arrested. I just would not mind not being homeless and this is something hard for people to understand?
Even the Doctors care less and less now that these private equity firms have taken over and Obamacare ruined the care I was getting previously.
But I have a new family now. A small group of friends that understand my illness comes with a genius (I have two degrees, Economics and American History) and help me when I am in a jam but I never ask them for more since they are just about as poor as me.
So I look to Christ, and The Buddha, to get closer to understanding the importance and the illusion of suffering so maybe I can see what they saw so completely. Right now, I can have fun, even with my suffering, and I feel that is a big step.
Thank you again Ian.
Joan
I appreciate this post, thanks Ian. I try to live by the golden rule, and to assume someone is neutral unless they prove otherwise. I like to think that by healing myself I am putting healing vibes into the world, and my work on self-unfolding encourages others to do so.
mago
Human suffering is beyond reckoning. Along with the Buddha’s discourse on old age sickness and death , we see war and poverty everywhere. Not to mention pestilence and famine.; environmental degradation; diseases unknown in the past affecting human beings and animals alike.
I daily contemplate the suffering of the voiceless and dependent, particularly animals, children and the elderly who are vulnerable to manipulation and neglect at the hands of predators who increasingly stalk the world.
It goes far deeper than that of course. This is just a blog comment and limited in scope.
The Buddha in his four noble truths noted that attachment is the cause of all suffering. What gets ignored is that it’s attachment to a nonexistent self that creates suffering. But enough.
It’s a topic beyond the scope of the format.
Thanks for expounding on this Ian.
Occasional Commentator
@Paul Harris “Psychopaths don’t decide to be cruel and can’t decide to be kind. It’s not a choice for them. We need to root them and expel them from civilisation. Exclude them.”
This is way too reductionist. Firstly, there is no falsifiable test for psychopathy and even if there were such a thing not all psychopaths do outright evil (many surgeons apparently display psychopathic traits). Secondly, even people who do very bad things (e.g. Hitler, Netanyahu) are kind to “the right” people. Hitler, famously, was a dog lover. Thirdly, locking people up or expelling them from society a priori for what they think or for what they might do in the future is, for obvious reasons, a bad idea.
Some people need to be punished and separated from the majority but if you want to live in a society that isn’t a paranoid dystopian hellhole this needs to be done based on rule-of-law and a person’s actions in the world, not on arbitrary criteria or pseudoscientific shoehorning.
Al Felix
Ian, thank you for this. Blessings
Curt Kastens
i find it interesting how much of your life mirrors that of Peter Attia, also a Canadian.
Jan Wiklund
On the average, you get a better return from being kind than from being malicious. At least, this was what Robert Axelrod discovered, see The evolution of cooperation. There are of course exceptions like Kissinger, but they are exceptions. Most of those who behave in that way get shunned and don’t achieve much.
Ian Welsh
That’s only localized true. Elites often get better results by cooperating with elites, not cooperating with the commons, as a rule. (There are always exceptions.) This is undeniable, given our experience since79 or so.
Kissinger cooperates a great deal: he is beloved by other elites in the politics/government spheres.
Stuff that works at the band/tribe level often does not translate to large societies.
Dan Kelly
I love you Ian Welsh. Thank you.
And even we losers who make our own hell by virtue of our bad decisions…even we losers get lucky sometimes.
The world keeps getting bigger when you get out on your own. But I know a place where a royal flush NEVER beats a pair:
https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=r6V5DXk6TbA
https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=oCxVZwh4AtA
Willy
I always run into the newbie who spends 10 minutes online to learn about P’s, to find that humanistic elite projection bit, where some ‘expert’ has proclaimed that we need P’s to do the jobs which are “too emotionally stressful” for the rest of us. As if we can make them care.
I call bullshit. I’ve known a few. Solid P’s are the very best of all types, whether residing in the hump of some emotional bell curve or way out at some extreme temperamental flange, at accepting each human exactly as they are (cut from whatever cloth and usually carrying around whatever anxieties and neurosis their painful experiences have saddled them with), to then make full use of whatever’s useful for them, for their own profit, power jollies, and amusement. This is their core talent.
Having a full-blown P doing any kind of surgery is far too great a risk.
Anecdotal, but I’ve never met a P who’s actually been a certifiable expert at anything besides being a P, definitely not beyond anything a more mediocre normal might be, although they’ve always been very good at conning others into believing in their ‘expertise’.
IMHO, true expertise is fueled by the anxieties and empathies which forces one to be afraid of being ignorant, as well as an honest love for the subject. Does that sound like a P to you? P’s will by nature put most of their energies into enhancing what comes most naturally for them, power and control over whatever prey. I’d need to see the studies which prove that between equally intelligent geeks and psychopathic students, that both wind up with an equivalent expertise.
How to separate them out from the rest of society? It seems plausible that back in more communistic neolithic days, our ancestors could do that, to exclude them from the cave clan once they’d demonstrated themselves. More eyes up close and personal.
But ever increasing population and technology enhances their ability to hide in plain sight. Something else making it harder to separate the sociopathc sheep from the psychopathic goats, is that psychopathy resides on a spectrum. How much is too much?
I have personal ways to determine this degree which works for me, but nobody’s gonna be making me that kind of “rule of law” expert anytime soon.
We do have emerging neuroimaging technologies. But yeah, rational empaths are going to have to be able to keep that under ethical control. As power and control freaks, psychopaths are pretty good at gaining influence over things.
someofparts
Well now I’m just curious. How DO you determine how psychopathic someone is?
Jan Wiklund
Ian: Certainly. Only cooperation works, but it doesn’t matter whom you cooperate with. People like Jeff Skilling, who made war against all, ended up in prison (see Peter Turchin: Ultrasociety for more details).
Ian Welsh
Yeah, that we join in groups to compete against others, sometimes against pretty much everyone isn’t exactly news. Small groups often control entire societies and kill or impoverish vast numbers of people.
Turchin has a tendency to state the blindingly obvious or the well known (elite overproduction, for example) as if it’s new and ingenious.
Willy
Disclaimer: this relates to me, my thinking, my physique, my temperament, my social presentation, and my experiences. Your own mileage will vary depending on your own primate appearance and abilities. For example, there seems to be something about me which suggests that I might retaliate ala ratfucker if you cross me, and so intelligent P’s prefer to employ a “keep your friends close but your (future) enemies closer” strategy against me.
Stupid Ps are easy to spot. As a kid my family was planted a couple doors down from one. She did stuff like expose herself, sucker other trusting kids into being attacked with mean pranks, and bored very quickly, never being able to play nice for more than a few minutes. The neighborhood parents finally declared her off limits. I don’t think she was entirely a product of her environment, with father a grumpy cop and mother a day pajama wearing alcoholic, because she was bookended by two normal and agreeable sisters a year older and younger who were never a problem.
I once read about an eldest child P girl who had a normal sister and normal brother. Her parents tried everything. They’d buy her a clarinet and she’d bash her sister over the head with it. They’d buy her a kitten and she’d try to flush it down the toilet. Every day was a trial. The parents wound up being outcast, taking all the blame from other traumatized parents. It was only later that they realized some kind of bad seen genetics had coalesced in that daughter.
Adult stupid Ps are chronic assholes without a cause. Easy to spot from a distance.
Willy
Smart adult Ps
The stare. Everybody knows about the infamous angry P ‘cat stare’ used to try and intimidate others. But I’m talking about when they first meet you. Every curious person checks out the newbie, but the P stares at you as if they’re studying you, and you’ve discounted all other possibilities such as ‘sexual attraction’ or you’ve got something stuck in your teeth.
They get up close and personal too quickly and too much. The wise know the types they naturally attract. P’s act attracted to you outside the norms you’re used to.
Backstabbing. One P was all “bro-n-buddy” over-enthusiastic on the phone with a certain geek who’d called the P to chat. After hanging up P noticed me looking and said “Yeah I know nobody likes the guy but you’ve gotta play the game”. I’d never disliked that guy and saw him at worst, as an overeager young dweeb with poor but honest social skills.
They lie a lot. They tell you they were US Marines White House Honor Guard, but your research reveals nothing more than their having been a grunt for the Coast Guard. They lie so much they’ll forget their lies.
Mirroring. You know they prefer Doom and Warcraft and think Myst a joke, but after finding out their prey likes Myst, they suddenly become Myst’s #1 fan. Think of what hunters and fishers do to lure their quarry and put those minds at ease. Same thing.
Kiss up kick down. Everybody does it to a degree, but Ps are way over the top. And triple the norm once they’ve gained power.
Way too diplomatic. Their people skills are superb, but hollow. Big discrepancy between word and deed, with the latter being the only way anybody can truly judge another.
Excellent ‘on the fly’ skills. Fantastic gift for gab. When attacked, right or wrongly, they’ll always flip the script to get off the defensive and attack the attacker.
Always blame something or someone else when caught. Rarely own up to small mistakes, never own up to big mistakes.
Superb self-control. Expert social skills. Never get rattled. This is why I’ll trust an overreactive oddball neurotic over the ever-calm alpha any day. The former’s being honest, the latter tactically skilled and demonstrating the classic P lack of social emotions which usually overwhelm normals under stress, like being suddenly embarrassed.
All negotiations are actually fact-finding missions. Since they cannot have empathy, they’ll fake a desire for capitulation to get you to reveal weaknesses to be exploited.
Incorrigible. Even if warned by a superior PTB to cease and desist, they’ll simply try other or less obvious tactics. Once their goals are set there’s little you can do about it.
Proclaim supermen abilities. Yet they never actually demonstrate it. They actually do believe that they’re some kind of superior ubermensch.
Trust your gut, because it’s a form of implicit memory. If you’re feeling unsettled weirdness about someone, careful meditation should reveal reasons based on the painful memories you’ve forgotten or trying to forget.
I’m describing just one intelligent P I knew. Others were different. He was the guy who despite having the least education and experience in our office, used his alpha male appearance, political skills, covert ruthlessness, and presentation to take control of an entire engineering organization. By the time management had figured him out, all was lost and everybody had to slink away to get new jobs. The PTB laid low, too afraid to admit to their folly or cross the guy lest he retaliate, which is their most defining feature.
someofparts
thanks Willy