Due to the social roles assigned to them, some critically important jobs ‘cap’ the compassion that those who hold them can possess, and this is undesirable.
Very interesting idea. Really insightful to pit the justification for a rule being enforced against what that does for the culture.
I started thinking of situations where instead a compassion floor could potentially result in problematic cultural shifts. For example I've heard anecdotes of social workers being used/manipulated by anti-social people (who lack compassion), and their profession having a compassion floor may create a culture that makes those incidents more likely. I feel it's a kind of weak example, but the post naturally got me searching for floors too.
I sit in a senior leadership role in a public corporation in the US, and my day to day involves a lot of decisions that grind at the edges of my compassion. I've been struggling to articulate how my peers have changed as I've come up through the ranks, and how I've changed to accommodate those decisions. This article was the first thing I read that gave me words for it other than blind defensiveness or assertions that everyone at the top is a sociopath.
Your framing gives me some place to start, in terms of trying to sustain the highest ceiling for compassion as high up as I can. Not just because it intuitively feels like the right thing to me, but because I buy that the movement of the median matters and that more compassionate groups of people are more inclined towards other valuable pro social behaviors.
If organizations have compassion ceilings, and "coming up through the ranks" requires systematically lower ceilings at every step, then "everyone at the top is a sociopath" becomes a plausible explanation. If the gatekeeping is such that only sociopaths can pass through the gates, then only "true" sociopaths and those who can induce it in themselves will be able to perform the job. The less "accountability"/oversight/buy-in from others that an organization has, the more "true" sociopaths will end up in leadership positions, and even stronger selection effects take hold.
That's why I don't like the phrase ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), since most cops are probably not natural sociopaths, the job simply induces mild sociopathy in order to perform it. But I will say that all police union leaders are bastards, since that job can only be done by those who are comfortable defending the worst people in the worst ways.
That's kind of my question. Are those gates that limit compassion intrinsic and fixed, or is there some flexibility in what we require and how we require it that preserves more compassion for longer.
Consider something as a simple as a generous severance policy above and beyond legal requirements or industry norms. One might think of that as merely an insurance policy against too much negativity or legal push back from departing employees, but this article adds a new dimension for your leadership team. You're almost guaranteed to need to some restructuring at points in a companies history, and that kind of blanket policy let's you do it with many much less sociopathic leaders (assuming the severance is enough to actual cushion those moments for affected individuals). And in a way, you could think of legal requirements for long notice periods and severance as society wide measures to manage compassion and limit sociopathy.
Basically, there can be things that cushion impact for the less powerful that are worth doing not just for the benefit of those impacted, but also to preserve the humanity of those causing the impact. And the more those policies are blanket ones, the more effectively you'll limit the gatekeeping.
I've also been thinking about similar concept through the lens of changing the individuals that enter into the roles or situations in addition to gatekeeping certain others. In particular, I think about the callousness I've gained by living in a dense area of a West Coast metro and facing the unsheltered homelessness crises here. I'm worried that living in any of Seattle, Portland, SF-area, or LA imposes a compassion ceiling, which is particularly worrying given the outsized impact folks in those cities have on our culture and society. So I'm also finding the compassion ceiling to be a helpful concept to articulate my thoughts on that!
This looks at the issues of de-compassioned activities we endure in a systemic way, but the reality on the ground, which in this cases is how the system is structured (emergently through iterated choices, or by mad design) is mediated by above average numbers of narcissists and thus their subset, the psychopath, who are strongly attracted to these roles, and who we thus fail to police (putting the fox in charge of the henhouse). (We would have to reform the police as a caring profession rather than a commission officer as some particulate of sovereign force.)
This sounds like the Tenth Man thought model: every decision making body has to have one designated person who is automatically against the consensus of the group. A soft veto. A Jiminey Cricket for when we merrily dance towards annihilation. All cops must answer calls with a grouchy old culture warrior in tow. Or maybe we turn social workers loose, each with a cop as personal escort, to do the bullying when it is deemed appropriate by the social worker.
Compassion can only really be exercised as one human to another individual human on your own behalf. There cannot be a compassionate institution. There can be a charitable institution, but not a compassionate one.
The complete lack of compassion in the fake 'compassion industry' of education is much more concerning to me than bully cops, which one expects, and which can actually be desirable in some cases.
I think of specialization as good; if a position requires... toughness, let us say, then it is good that there are tough people in it, right? Compassionate people should go where compassion is most useful, not spread thin everywhere willy-nilly, right?
Very interesting idea. Really insightful to pit the justification for a rule being enforced against what that does for the culture.
I started thinking of situations where instead a compassion floor could potentially result in problematic cultural shifts. For example I've heard anecdotes of social workers being used/manipulated by anti-social people (who lack compassion), and their profession having a compassion floor may create a culture that makes those incidents more likely. I feel it's a kind of weak example, but the post naturally got me searching for floors too.
I really appreciate this.
I sit in a senior leadership role in a public corporation in the US, and my day to day involves a lot of decisions that grind at the edges of my compassion. I've been struggling to articulate how my peers have changed as I've come up through the ranks, and how I've changed to accommodate those decisions. This article was the first thing I read that gave me words for it other than blind defensiveness or assertions that everyone at the top is a sociopath.
Your framing gives me some place to start, in terms of trying to sustain the highest ceiling for compassion as high up as I can. Not just because it intuitively feels like the right thing to me, but because I buy that the movement of the median matters and that more compassionate groups of people are more inclined towards other valuable pro social behaviors.
If organizations have compassion ceilings, and "coming up through the ranks" requires systematically lower ceilings at every step, then "everyone at the top is a sociopath" becomes a plausible explanation. If the gatekeeping is such that only sociopaths can pass through the gates, then only "true" sociopaths and those who can induce it in themselves will be able to perform the job. The less "accountability"/oversight/buy-in from others that an organization has, the more "true" sociopaths will end up in leadership positions, and even stronger selection effects take hold.
That's why I don't like the phrase ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), since most cops are probably not natural sociopaths, the job simply induces mild sociopathy in order to perform it. But I will say that all police union leaders are bastards, since that job can only be done by those who are comfortable defending the worst people in the worst ways.
That's kind of my question. Are those gates that limit compassion intrinsic and fixed, or is there some flexibility in what we require and how we require it that preserves more compassion for longer.
Consider something as a simple as a generous severance policy above and beyond legal requirements or industry norms. One might think of that as merely an insurance policy against too much negativity or legal push back from departing employees, but this article adds a new dimension for your leadership team. You're almost guaranteed to need to some restructuring at points in a companies history, and that kind of blanket policy let's you do it with many much less sociopathic leaders (assuming the severance is enough to actual cushion those moments for affected individuals). And in a way, you could think of legal requirements for long notice periods and severance as society wide measures to manage compassion and limit sociopathy.
Basically, there can be things that cushion impact for the less powerful that are worth doing not just for the benefit of those impacted, but also to preserve the humanity of those causing the impact. And the more those policies are blanket ones, the more effectively you'll limit the gatekeeping.
I've also been thinking about similar concept through the lens of changing the individuals that enter into the roles or situations in addition to gatekeeping certain others. In particular, I think about the callousness I've gained by living in a dense area of a West Coast metro and facing the unsheltered homelessness crises here. I'm worried that living in any of Seattle, Portland, SF-area, or LA imposes a compassion ceiling, which is particularly worrying given the outsized impact folks in those cities have on our culture and society. So I'm also finding the compassion ceiling to be a helpful concept to articulate my thoughts on that!
This looks at the issues of de-compassioned activities we endure in a systemic way, but the reality on the ground, which in this cases is how the system is structured (emergently through iterated choices, or by mad design) is mediated by above average numbers of narcissists and thus their subset, the psychopath, who are strongly attracted to these roles, and who we thus fail to police (putting the fox in charge of the henhouse). (We would have to reform the police as a caring profession rather than a commission officer as some particulate of sovereign force.)
This sounds like the Tenth Man thought model: every decision making body has to have one designated person who is automatically against the consensus of the group. A soft veto. A Jiminey Cricket for when we merrily dance towards annihilation. All cops must answer calls with a grouchy old culture warrior in tow. Or maybe we turn social workers loose, each with a cop as personal escort, to do the bullying when it is deemed appropriate by the social worker.
Compassion can only really be exercised as one human to another individual human on your own behalf. There cannot be a compassionate institution. There can be a charitable institution, but not a compassionate one.
The complete lack of compassion in the fake 'compassion industry' of education is much more concerning to me than bully cops, which one expects, and which can actually be desirable in some cases.
I think of specialization as good; if a position requires... toughness, let us say, then it is good that there are tough people in it, right? Compassionate people should go where compassion is most useful, not spread thin everywhere willy-nilly, right?