The Gift of Arrogance

Compassion

“Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”

~Frederick Buechner

Recently, I was in the car with a friend of mine, and I looked over to her and said, “Look I don’t want to overstep my boundaries so tell me if this makes you feel uncomfortable, but I get the feeling that you are very afraid of disappointing people.”

She looked as if she had been slapped in the face as she muttered, “You’re really good at reading people.” I proceeded to ask her the fundamental question to insight: Why?

There are two simple secrets to insight that will make you the best people reader you can be. These are compassion and critical thought. In this chapter we will explore the former, while leaving the latter for its own chapter.

My friend’s fear of disappointing others was, as I suspected, related to her fears of  being alone. I turned to her once more and said, “I tried being someone I wasn’t when I liked this girl this year, and trust me by changing yourself to avoid disappointing others it does more harm than good. Be yourself.”

She uttered, “I know,” in a layman’s attempt at masking the dismissive tone in her voice. She didn’t buy it. It killed me to see her making the same mistakes I did. Seeing her open the same door of pain and misery that I had just months before that.

I turned over to her and addressed her by name and she replied, “Yes?”

“Don’t ever be afraid to disappoint me,” I said with my heart sinking.

She said, “Okay,” with the type of subtle smile that made it clear she didn’t even know she was smiling. That indicates true psychological comfort, which meant my honest caring allowed her to be happy. Her happiness was a small consolation, as I knew she was on a path that would only do her injustice. The very thing that gave me my insight was what nagged at me. Recognizing, understanding, and empathizing with her emotions gave me a clearer look into her psyche than people who would write her off as annoying when she is acting deceptive or not being herself.

You may say, “Who cares about why she does what she does? If she has a problem, it’s on her, not me!” To support this you may use Social Darwinism. The commonly cited theory that only the best deserve anything. To answer this citation I would like to cite chapter 4 of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, where Darwin claims that the highest moral achievement that man or any other organism can attain is compassion for all living organisms. The theorist who coined the phrase, “Survival of the fittest,” was actually the greatly disturbed Herbert Spencer, a sociologist who read Darwin’s work. Spencer’s theory should be taken the same way as Freud’s theory of the universality of Oedipal Complexes. The hardship of his life was an anomaly, and his theory reflected his experience rather than hard empirical evidence. The species with the most altruism have been shown to be the most enduring. This principle is directly related to a tenet of my faith system, Unitarian Universalism (I’m agnostic but so are a fair amount of UUists), which is respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. To make myself insightful I leave my faith in love rather than the supernatural.

Once you have this whole compassion thing down (it’s harder than it looks), then when you look around you will feel overwhelmed by the number of problems that you, rather irrationally, feel connected to. The risk of leading with love is the risk of flying by the seat of your pants fighting the anguish of others and by extension yourself. Always.

This compassion does not only aid in empathy but also trust. As Paul Ekman, the world’s leading expert in facial expression and deception, will tell you trust lowers detection apprehension. He often comments on this in his book Telling Lies. We will talk about deception later on, but the point is that when people trust you they lower their nonverbal awareness and raise their nonverbal honesty. When a person continually treats others with altruism and empathy, it becomes a personality trait recognizable by others. This personality trait is often associated with being humble, kind, and trustworthy. It proves to be instrumental in reading people. The only reason I knew things months in advance to my peers in high school was because I constantly showed a desire to help and kept my mouth shut about things told to me in confidence.

My choir teacher, who I routinely helped and spoke with, was counting votes on a ballot that I was nominated for (albeit we both knew it was a popularity contest and one of the pretty girls would win), and I happened to be showing him a comic on Tone Deaf Comics (a website full of very funny music comics) right before he was going to count the votes. He then stated “You keep your mouth shut,” in a matter of fact tone and beckoned me over to help him count them. As a result, I knew who was going to win a month before anyone else in the choir.

Likewise, one of my band directors was like a second father as well. I would always go to every concert of his (including the ones I was not in) to help set up and tear down the stage after. He felt comfortable enough to tell me about drama in the music office and other students. This year, I was saving for a new gig bag for my euphonium (a brass instrument that looks like a small tuba), and he heard about it. These things cost around $200, and he decided to buy it for me as a surprise graduation present. With it came a card that said how much my dedication, work ethic, and friendship has meant to him and how beneficial I have been to the band program. People I know well will tell you that I rarely cry, but with such kind words and the meaningful gift. I was bawling. Every time I move, see, or play my euphonium (a few times a day), I remember how valuable of a trait compassion is to my life and the lives to others around me.

If these examples were not enough, you may consider the man who works at the gas station near my house. I frequently go there to get Mountain Dew for long walks. He has a low self esteem and sometimes shuffles about like Igor from Frankenstein. He is always friendly, and early on I suspected from nonverbal communication that the only thing he feels truly proud of is his son. So I made a point of asking about his son every time I saw him in an effort to lift his spirits and self esteem however temporarily. He now greets me fondly whenever I walk in  and charges me the refill rate on my sodas which saves me 42 cents on each soda. I’m almost always broke, so that is a big deal to me.

I could go on and on about how my own compassion has touched my life and the lives of others, but I think that the point has been well made that compassion is central to getting to know others. Reading people often doesn’t work the way it does on TV. Reading people for the sake of mocking them will lead to more failures than any other method. You must connect with people to get a baseline and understand the context. It will be hard, but it is very rewarding.