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@ Sacred Peak
2025-03-04 13:43:36
Pema Chodron, a female Tabetan Buddhist labeled this type of phoney empathy/compassion "idiot compassion" in the 1990s.
It is not only some women who do this. There are 2 men on my block who behave the same way. Some women do not do this. Some men do not do this. I get the gender angle and it has a certain logic but I am sure that mostly what drives this is emotional immaturity.
I have thought about this considerably, watched it play out in my life and a not small part of me thinks that "idiot compassion" is carried out by people who are either dead inside or can not grow up to know that saying "no" is sometimes, perhaps often the correct and compassionate/empathetic response.
Idiot compassion is also what has led to schools passing kids who have not sufficiently mastered what they are supposed to be learning.
Another word that is in the same ball park is "enabling"
Consider this: it is easier to pretend that people are not useless than confront it as a fact. Having to confront it may involve guilt, which is complicated (a feeling within a feeling). Or, having to deal with idiots telling you that you are "mean".
When people support each other (enable) in their own delusions about their own competence/incompetence we end up where we are now in the world.
Once, a long time ago a person I used to know said... "so everyone can keep on lying to each other"... he was talking about this same thing.
In Zen Buddhism, sometimes this societal lying and delusion is referred to as "the floating realm", because it is an ephemeral thing that floats over actual reality.
Sometimes I call it "The Overlay", as in oldschool overhead projectors when another clear plastic slide with different information is overlaid over a map in geography class to show another perspective.
#genX #wisdom #fakeworld #idiotcompassion