I’m have been thinking about the topic of compassion and “Love Thy Neighbor” and kindness towards those who are less fortunate.

This seems to be lacking in our society and political leadership.

Everyone has some level of compassion – I think this is in fact even more important than higher intelligence as what differentiates humans from other animals. Not only are we capable of longer-range thinking, we are capable of longer-range compassion – not only our offspring or tribe, but compassion towards larger communities, everyone, even all sentient beings.

This potential for great compassion is a distinctive advantage for survival of a species, especially when it forms and depends on more complex and long-distance inter-relationships. Compassion is the glue for relationships, and without it they falter and weaken. Holding a large complex society together is all about relationships, but without compassion these relationships break.

But here’s the most interesting observation about compassion. There are two flavors of compassion. One I would call “mind compassion” and the other “heart compassion.”

Mind compassion is when a person is capable of understanding and having thoughts of sympathy towards the suffering of others. It’s rational compassion.

Heart compassion is an altogether different thing – a completely different dimension – the dimension of one’s core emotional center – what we call “the heart.”

Heart compassion is where you don’t just think about compassion or of having concern for others, but you literally FEEL this in your heart so to speak.

What’s struck me today is that not everyone feels or experiences heart compassion. I never really understood this. Everyone has mind compassion to some degree. But there is in fact a surprisingly large percentage of people who literally just don’t experience – or maybe recognize – heart compassion.

And this is why the very same people who seem to have mind compassion are still capable of great cruelty towards other beings. I never could understand this – I was always asking “but how can they do this?” To me it is just unthinkable. To them it seems to pose no big dilemma. How? Because they literally don’t feel it!

People with heart compassion are not capable of causing suffering in others if it can be avoided, because they feel that suffering themselves. Causing other people to suffer is causing oneself to suffer too.

If you have heart compassion the suffering of others is unbearable and you want to do anything you can to relieve it for them, because their suffering is your suffering – you know deeply that you can never truly be happy when so many other people are suffering. It’s an actual feeling not an idea.

If you don’t experience this yourself, then I can’t explain it to you, but if you do then you know exactly what I am talking about.

We are all born with heart compassion, and the degree to which this flowers or rots is mostly based on the parenting we underwent as children. In a healthy loving family the child’s natural heart compassion is celebrated and supported and they are able to grow into a mature compassionate adult. But so many families have unhealthy dynamics that prevent this or limit it severely. Today we live in a world of very damaged people – and this goes back to unhealthy family dynamics.

And this is why we now live in a world of adults in which so many seem to lack heart compassion. It starts with early childhood and the family environment. But culture also plays a huge role – our eroding culture creates the conditions for these damaged people to act with impunity and cause harm to a great number of others. It’s a perfect storm.

In a healthy society and culture, acts of kindness, mercy, brotherly and sisterly love, caring for the sick and elderly, taking care of veterans, teachers, and those who help others — these are celebrated. This is echoed by the celebrity class and the political class – good deeds and kindness and caring are celebrated. In a healthy society leaders want to serve as role models for what it is to be a good person. Goodness is celebrated.

In an unhealthy society we see a shift from celebrating acts of loving kindness and compassion to celebrating acts of power, control, violence, war, and hatred. This can only happen in a society that is dominated or controlled by adults who for one reason or another lack heart compassion.

So one way to look at the problem we face in the USA – and also the world today – is a global decline in compassion, or alternatively the rise of less compassionate elite in control of societies. And at its root it is because there a not enough people in power who have the direct palpable experience of heart compassion.

But this is an interesting question. We have seen in other eras that it is possible for periods in history to occur where elites and governments are more more aligned around values of kindness and compassion towards their citizens and neighbors. So this proves they ARE capable of it.

Then the question follows, what caused that? What caused our present ere to be NOT that? Is there a way to engineer it and – if it could be done – could that be applied therapeutically restore compassion to an unhealthy society that is severely lacking in it? Can we teach it? Can we heal our broken society?

Actually I do think a more compassionate society can be engineered with the science of memetics and spread via social media, the same way our present less compassionate society is spreading the opposite messages via social media. But it costs money.

I think the best vector for transmitting compassion in a society like ours is to spread positive healthy messages via memes in pop culture + social media. And music, video and film are some of the most powerful ways to do so.

Think about it. Jazz and rock music were each absolutely the key mediums for the transmitting the important ideas that shaped the civil rights movement, and all kinds of other America-defining ideas we now hold dear. They are proven effective!

I think the best and most viral way to spread and teach compassion and possibly heal our society is through music, video, film, animation and yes … most importantly … games.

This of course requires artists to take the initiative and lead this creatively, and risk being unpopular by doing so – and it also requires a large enough audience for it to work. I think both the artists and the audience exist – but they are fragmented and need to be united by a common cause – or least a small set of common causes.

There is also another problem: games in our culture – most of the most popular mobile and online games teach and train users in either addictive behavior, violent behavior, or various forms of insecurity, fear, desire and greed.

I’m not against fun. I like games too – but I’ve never been into first-person shooter games. That’s because the very idea of shooting someone else makes me a little sick to my stomach and it doesn’t feel “fun” to me to rehearse it in a game either.

When I see someone experiencing actual glee in even the simulated act of harming another being in a game there is a part of me that is concerned for their mental well-being and everyone’s well-being. I don’t have to think about it – it’s just immediately and naturally palpable and there. That’s heart compassion versus mind compassion.

Now think about how many hours per week every child, teen and really most males under 30 (or older in some cases) puts towards these kinds of less healthy games. How can that be healthy for them or for society? I mean yes within limits it’s no big deal, but I would venture to say it’s a much more serious societal mental health issue than anyone realizes or is willing to admit.

It turns out that many school shooters are also people who spend a lot of time in these especially violent shooter games, and I don’t this is a complete coincidence.

I think to some extent violent games play a causal role in developing violent people, and violent people come from a lack of heart compassion which starts with their family when they were children. So to deeply solve this issue you have to make healthy families not just healthy individuals. And you also have to solve the issue of extremely violent games.

The question is, what can be done about violence in games and the harmful mental health effects it has on youth in particular? To some extent it could be regulated, but this is difficult to accomplish or enforce when games originate from many countries in different jurisdictions. Can less violent / less negative games be made and attract the same level of usage? Maybe – although it is very hard for higher-brain content to complete with lower-brain “limbic” content. This is a very hairy problem. But it is a critical one to think deeply about.

One general observation about this issue is that we need to find ways to get people to spend more time in the non-digital world. The physical world and real physical experience of the physical world is at risk of being replaced by the digital experiences. But in the digital world it’s too easy to depersonalize people. We have to take more active steps to counter that.

It’s inevitable that the physical and digital worlds will merge, and they already have to some extent, but which one is going to matter more? Do we care?

I think the answer is the physical world matters more than the digital world for our survival as a species. We are physical beings in fact, no matter how much time we spend online. You can kill for fun in a video game but in the physical world there are actual consequences for doing that. The problem arises when people lose perspective on that fact.

The risk is that everyone is losing perspective and depersonalizing each other more than they used to due to spending more time in the digital world.

This is a real shift in the character of what it is like to be a human. It’s like moving from one climate (tropical) to another (arctic) – it changes everything about a people and a civilization if you change its climate. Similarly our civilization is spending much of its time in a new digital climate. This is going to change us in ways we can’t imagine yet.

Coming back to the original topic – compassion – it is clear that our society is moving towards a far less kind and less compassionate period in history. A time in which our leaders and governments will celebrate and legislate cruelty. It will be a time that will be oriented towards what separates us instead of what unifies us.

We must find ways to counter the increasing trend towards depersonalization of other people that the digital world, and digital relationships, is bringing about. We must find ways to somehow reinforce, reward, and teach compassion through digital media.

In coming years, those who have actual heart compassion will be increasingly in the minority and under fire. It’s going to be a very difficult period for America, and for all reasonable, kind-hearted and good people.

We will all be forced to make choices about what we truly stand for and what we believe is right, and to choose compassion over hatred and fear, and it may come at great personal and professional cost to do so. But still we must stand up for what we know is good. Because that is who we are.