Competitive Compassion Dream Scene # 1 for IAOEAAO

Actually written JULY 28, 2017

[IAOEAAO stands for: Incoherent Adventures of Everything All at Once. This was the title of a zine I once made, and later the title for a movie I hoped to make.] 

Homeless person drifts off to sleep in a downtown business doorway.

Thus begins their dream, as follows:

GAME SHOW HOST: “Good evening, fellow humans and welcome to tonight’s episode of The Competitive Compassion Show! – the show where schools of thought compete to be the most compassionate as judged by our studio audience.

“Tonight’s contestants: Elitist Compassion versus Egalitarian Compassion. Who will our studio audience judge more compassionate?

“Let’s begin with you, Elitist Compassion.

“Elitist Compassion: what does that even mean? It sounds like an oxymoron. Care to explain?”

ELITIST COMPASSION: “Gladly.

“It’s important to grasp two crucial aspects of elitist compassion.

“1. We elitist compassion folk are cautiously prepared to recognize that at least some inequality may be natural, as opposed to the egalitarian compassion folk who insist that all inequality is a social construct.

“2. Whatever inequality does exist, whether natural or socially constructed, we seek to abolish. We have this in common with egalitarian compassion people. Our goal is essentially the same.

“So the ‘elitist’ in my name refers only to how we believe nature has created an unequal elite. It does not mean we enjoy that inequality. Quite the opposite. We disparage it.”

HOST: “Oh. So you align yourself with race realists, anti-feminists, and other ‘red pill’ folk, then?”

ELITIST COMPASSION: “We elitist compassion folk might share some common ground with them, cautiously, and only in terms of recognizing some inequality is natural. But since they never seem to express any abhorrence for that inequality, I cannot in good conscience claim we truly align.”

HOST: “Ok. Elitist Compassion, give us your compassion spiel.”

ELITIST COMPASSION: “My compassion is based on the premise that if you’re suffering, I mean really, chronically suffering, you’re suffering because you are on the low end of the spectrum of ability. You lack skills. You lack charisma. You lack intellect. You lack physical or spiritual beauty. You lack something that would enable you to achieve happiness. 

“And these deficiencies are a tragically natural condition that we can’t blame anyone for, not even society. Your deficiencies come from the nature of how you relate to the rest of the physical and social world. And this nature is absolute, resistant to change by mere wishful thinking.

“And my compassion for you is pity. I pity you for your tragic deficiencies.

“And what I plan to do about it is to promote science in the hopes that we may eventually obtain the knowledge required to relieve your suffering, either by technologically changing the environment, or by technologically empowering you to change yourself, or some balance of both. Environmental changes might include making food more nutritious and super abundant, making shelter super abundant, and generally making a physically comfortable life affordable to even those who don’t have an income at all. Changes to you yourself might include increasing your intellect, curing all diseases, making your body more durable and efficient, radically reshaping your body according to whatever aesthetic preferences you may have, and making death itself optional.

“But of course these scientific advances likely won’t happen in our lifetime. And that is horrible. Most sufferers will go to their grave with nothing but miserable life. And all we have to offer is perhaps noble martyrdom, where you go to your grave without standing in the way of scientific progress that will help the next generation, maybe, or the one after that, or who knows how many generations it might take to lick the actual problem. There might be seven generations following you, of noble martyrs just like you: noble, who at least don’t support political agendas that kill or hamper scientific progress.”

Buzzer sounds.

HOST: “Oooooh! Our studio audience is already voting you down. It looks like they find your compassion seriously lacking!

“But don’t worry too much about that. You’ll have more chances to state your case later.

“Right now, however, it is time to hear from your competitor, Egalitarian Compassion.”

“So, Egalitarian Compassion, what is your spiel?”

EGALITARIAN COMPASSION: “If you are suffering, my compassion for you is based on the fact that everyone already is equal. Whatever’s hurting you isn’t coming from some inherent deficiency you supposedly have in your relationship with some absolute nature. It’s coming from people like Elitist Compassion over here, who feels superior to you, who are rationalizing excuses to continue treating you like shit. 

“Decode their word ‘deficiency’. What does it mean? It means ‘inferiority”.  These jerks want you to believe you’re inferior because they believe you’re inferior – that’s the only reason. There’s no ‘nature’ in it. It’s just them and their agenda, trying to pretend it’s a natural thing when it’s actually just a social thing. 

“Everything that hurts you is a social thing. It’s a social construct that can be challenged and overturned by political means – because everyone deserves to be, and everyone is, equal already. If you’re hurting, there’s no need for you to hurt – except by the designs of these fascist fuckers over here like Elitist Compassion.

“While science is useful for taming certain harsh environments, it isn’t the universal cure for suffering. And it need not be. The real fundamental cure is social and political. We don’t need science. We need to understand that all these deficiencies, these dimensions of ‘inferiority’, such as IQ and physical beauty and economic worth, are social constructs that can be changed or eliminated by political reform.

“And this is good news, since political revolution is more likely to happen in one’s lifetime than some fantastical and likely hazardous advanced science that only caters to the constructs they’ve already created out of a twisted sort of malevolence in the first place.

“So, there’s no need to be a noble martyr.  At least not a martyr to science. Maybe if the political revolution is slow in coming, we could be noble martyrs to sluggish political change. But at least we’ll go to our noble graves knowing we never had any real inferiorities, just trumped up bullshit socially constructed inferiorities.”

The audience cheers approval.

HOST: “Well, it looks like Elitist compassion failed miserably and Egalitarian Compassion walks away with all the glory, winning everything. Every ounce of approval this audience can muster has been directed exclusively at Egalitarian Compassion.

“But now it’s time for round 2. In round 2, our two contestants will defend their position in terms of how much sense they make. That is, is their position logically coherent? Or is it mush?

“Again, Elitist Compassion, what have you to say?”

ELITIST COMPASSION: “Well, I say that my opponent’s position is logical mush, or rather, illogical, incoherent mush – because, although they haven’t stated this explicitly, I’m sure that if we dig down deep enough, they believe in the primacy of consciousness, that is, that reality and truth are manufactured by consciousness, rather than existing naturally and independently of consciousness.

“They believe that consciousness creates truth, creates reality – especially collective consciousness, the collective consciousness of a society, for example – which is why they use the phrase ‘social constructs’. The premise behind their use of that phrase is that truth and existence itself is the construct, i.e. manufactured by a collective of conscious entities. And this is illogical, self-contradictory mush.

“The mush behind it is the self-refutation of omnipotence – because they are in fact stating a brand of omnipotence – the same kind of omnipotence that we have imagined deities and gods to have had all these centuries.  Their brethren and sistren have attacked the religious traditionalists in terms of this very self-contradiction of omnipotence by such catchy phrases as ‘if God is omnipotent, then can God create an object that even God cannot move?’.  And while this has brought to light the problem with omnipotence, their own theory of the primacy of consciousness, in its collective form or individual form – it doesn’t matter – commits the same basic error that they’re pointing out in the religious traditionalists – that they seem so hell-bent to oppose.

“The notion that society can change truth and existence itself is in fact omnipotence on par with the omnipotence that the religious traditionalists have spewed all these centuries. And the same problem applies to it. Can culture, can society, create an object that even society and culture cannot move? No! The same self-refutation applies – because if truth is subject to culture and society, then culture and society can create and make true the fact that they don’t have the power to create truth.  That’s the contradiction. It’s built right in. You can’t get rid of it. You can’t outrun it.

“Your only alternative, in the face of this, is to try some pandering to the legitimacy of contradiction itself, and say that, ‘well, sure that’s a contradiction, but contradictions are ok. Contradictions grant you the flexibility you need to avoid being a stick in the mud, an anal – you know – to avoid being an anal fascist and taking things too seriously. You have to embrace contradiction. Well blah blah blah blah.’ 

“Well, as soon as you embrace contradiction, all your words have no fucking meaning. And you can’t make a single statement that’s even slightly relevant to the relief of suffering. And if you’re truly interested in the relief of suffering, you want to be able to say meaningful things about suffering – to devise a plan to get rid of it. But once you embrace contradiction, you have rendered yourself incapable of making such statements. 

“You have become an incoherent mass of uselessness – except for one thing: you offer suffering people bullshit, necessarily neurotic beliefs that help them believe that they’re gonna get relief in their lifetime – which, to a certain extent, in an ironic kind of way, does relieve their suffering because it gives them hope and keeps them moving from day to day.  And I support this limited approach to relief. But when it comes to the meat of relieving actual suffering all the way, it’s mush. It doesn’t make any goddamned sense. I rest my case.”

Shot of audience looking annoyed and worried – wanting to boo, but worried that Elitist Compassion had won this round.

HOST: “OK, now let’s hear from Egalitarian Compassion.”

EGALITARIAN COMPASSION: “Well, look. You [Elitist Compassion] appear to be promoting realism. But that’s been proven impossibly wrong too.

“Maybe we social constructivists have a problem with the self-contradiction of omnipotence. But you realists have a problem with the phenomenon of total and inescapable relativity.

[The Epistemology chapter of this book {blog} will agonize over this point.]

How much of your conscious experience is relative to the way your consciousness works, versus the product of the way the objects really are? Kant has made a good case that all of it, all the content of your experience is just relative. There’s no object out there. It has no part in your experience. You’re trapped in the appearances of objects, not in the way objects actually are. So you can’t tell us we have any grasp of the truth independent of our consciousness in the first place. Case done!”

Audience cheers approval.

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