Exposure-Involvement-Experience and Compassion

Was reflecting today on how it is essential for there to be insight, and thus compassion, for there to be experience. Experience can mean involvement – being involved with things – or in another sense it can me being exposed. In computer parlance this could be expressed as having a surface that is potentially vulnerable.

If you live in an insularized little shell, a reduced existence not in contact with the real world, you will not have the capacity to form sound judgements because you lack critical insight. Nothing can compensate for this lack. No amount of money nor material things will substitute. In fact, material wealth is actually an obstacle to insight and compassion. It leads to the opposite: delusion and derangement.

Experience/involvement is the only way to have true insight and compassion. Critical lack of experience/involvement explains at least in part why there is so much catastrophically bad leadership in the world, as things shift from what would have been the vestiges of nobility to credentialism, under which it’s possible to completely lack experience but nonetheless attain a high status.

This is a disastrous situation and explains fully why so many ‘leaders’ – a.k.a. credentialed bureaucrats – are making catastrophically bad decisions which are resulting in vast increases in suffering and devastation.

This has been expressed in the saying:

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

The ‘weak men’ are not just men, but a whole class of credentialed bureaucrats and ‘leaders’ who lack experience and thus the insight necessary to form just decisions.