Just a gimmick

"Suppose I were an extraterrestrial," the man said quietly.  "Suppose I were several million years ahead of this planet.  What one question would you ask me?"

"Why is there so much violence and hatred among us?" Benny asked at once.

"It's always that way on primitive planets," the man said.  "The early stages of evolution are never pretty."

"Do planets grow up?" Benny asked.

"Some of them," the man said simply.

"How?"

"Through suffering enough, they learn wisdom."

Benny turned and looked at his odd companion.  He *is* an actor, he thought.  "Through suffering," he repeated.  "There's no other way?"

"Not in the primitive stages," the man said.  "Primitives are too self-centered to ask the important questions, until suffering forces them to ask."

Benny felt the grief pass through him again, and leave.  He grinned.  "You play this game very well."

"Anybody can do it," the man said.  "It's a gimmick, to get outside your usual mind-set.  You can do it too.  Just try for a minute - you be the advanced intelligence, and I'll be the primitive Terran.  Okay?"

"Sure," Benny said, enjoying this.

"Why me?" The stranger's tone was intense.  "Why have I been singled out for so much injustice and pain?"

"There is no known answer to that," Benny said at once.  "Some say it's just chance - hazard - statistics.  Some say there is a Plan, and that you were chosen to learn an important lesson.  Nobody knows, really.  The important thing is to ask the next question."

"And what is the next question?"

Benny felt as if this was easy.  "The next question is, What do I do about it?  How ever many minutes or hours or years or decades I have left, what do I do to make sense out of it all?"

"Hey, that's good," the stranger said.  "You play Higher Intelligence very well."

"It's just a gimmick," Benny said...

That passage is from The Universe Next Door by Robert Anton Wilson.  It's one of my favorite books, and while the novel as a whole is pretty chaotic, this passage is one of the most coherent, simple, straight-forward expressions of an idea I like that I've ever read.

I have no empathy - or, at least, so little that it might as well be none.  I don't qualify for Antisocial Personality Disorder solely on the basis that I'm not violent (I dislike violence and destruction in general).  I think a big part of it is that I don't feel like a member of the same species as everyone else, so that no one ever feels like "one of us" to me.  Everyone's a stranger.  I can stand in a room full of close friends and family and still feel completely isolated and alone.

Now, don't get me wrong - I fake empathy well enough that most people just think I'm a little distant/weird.  Jokes about Vulcans and robots and "typical IT personality" surround me, but they're "just jokes" to most people.  The truth is, I'm actually a fairly good student of human psychology and extremely adept at both manipulation and faking.

And, yet, I don't do it (most of the time; I admit to slipping once in a while).  I don't take advantage of people or abuse others' emotional states.  In fact, I'm often the person who is more concerned that others aren't being mistreated or feeling left out or abused: I'm better at seeing it, because I know how I would do it if I wanted to.

Sometimes, having no empathy is an advantage.  My step-father hurt himself pretty badly last week, and I spent the first 24 hours after trying to keep my mother from going into emotional meltdown.  Her statement, once he started improving and she started being less frantic, was, "You're my rock."  Yep, that's me - the rock, the stone, the one who isn't moved.  She meant it as a compliment, as most people do, implying some kind of virtue on my part for sacrificing my own emotional needs to be supportive of others.  Except, I had none, so there was nothing to sacrifice.

What it is, really, is what the passage at the start of this post asks: even if there's suffering in this world, even if there's tragedy or personal struggle, the question we should ask is, "What am I going to do about it?"  I decided I dislike such things, aesthetically, so I do what I can to stop them: to help those who need help, to be the rock for those who need a rock, or even to just give a single moment of hope to someone who otherwise might not have it.  It's what I mean when I say, "I can't save the world, but if I can save one person, I can help teach the world to save itself."

Think about that this week while you lament the cowardice of the bombing of Boston or shake your head in disbelief at the explosion in Texas.  Instead of asking why - why they would do such a thing, why regulators let such a dangerous place be surrounded by families - ask what you, yourself, are going to do about it: a $5 gift to a charity, donating blood at the local hospital, a different vote on the next ballot, whatever it may be.  It doesn't have to be much - there may not be much you can do - but a few hundred million people doing a little is a whole lot better than seven billion doing nothing.

And think about what the advanced intelligence would say to the primitive Terran.  What harm can it do?  It's just a gimmick.