Compassion and Its Limits

Compassion, Its Limits, and Where to Go from Here

There is a great biopic of Brian Wilson, the composer of the Beach Boys’ songs, which depicts the brutal treatment he suffered at the hands of his father (also by his legal guardian, brilliantly played by Paul Giamatti). Some of this was physical, but the major part of it was dad repeatedly putting him down, including telling him that his music was trivial and that he would amount to nothing. This would have crushed a weaker soul, but Brian’s reaction was to become an outstanding musician, innovative and creative, always pushing the envelope. This drama exemplifies the analysis of the Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler, who coined the phrase “inferiority complex.” Adler claimed that if a person secretly felt they were inferior, they would seek to counteract this by pursuing a “superiority complex.” Much of this vaunted superiority is typically phony, but in Brian’s case, as with many creative people, it is a genuine attempt to show that you really do have the goods. Brian certainly had them.

This is, of course, a dichotomous way of thinking, Thesis leading to Antithesis, so to speak: a simple reflex reaction. You put me down; I fight back. Which raises the following question: Is there a lifepath that transcends the oppositional way of life? It was the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi who wrote, “Beyond Yes and No, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

What exactly is this field? Some scholars say it is a spiritual state of oneness, of pure connection. I’m thinking it might also refer to radical acceptance, the idea that the world as it exists, which includes abusive fathers, is reality, period. It might also include compassion for, and understanding of, such cruel behavior. After all, Brian’s father had no self-transparency; it wasn’t part of his constitution. As in the case of most of us, his behavior was almost completely robotic (in his case, driven by unconscious Oedipal jealousy). If Donald Trump, a paradigmatic robot, were able to come to terms with what his niece Mary has written about him—that he is pathetically trying to fill a huge void at the center of his soul—he would likely have a nervous breakdown. Nearly every action of his is designed to hide his secret loser status from himself, that of a deeply wounded creature. The problem is that this lack of insight has resulted in an enormous amount of damage; to take but one recent example, causing the death of 168 girls (ages 7 to 15) in a school in Minab, Iran, in February of 2026. Should we have compassion for him, then? Or compassion for Hitler, or Stalin? Surely there is a point at which we must resist, draw the proverbial line in the sand, no? The Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls once said that there are “poisoned people,” ones for whom very little could be done. All of us have met such individuals, and we rightly regard them as assholes. A large consensus, both national and international, has it that Donald Trump is one of the greatest assholes who ever lived.

But then, on rare occasions, we come across someone with a huge heart, someone who doesn’t resent anyone, or try to impress anyone: Pope Leo, Gandhi, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Dag Hammarskjöld, maybe even your next-door neighbor, for all you know. The problem is that the ratio of assholes to these types of people is something on the order of a million to one.

What is to be done? asked Lenin, in 1901. More than a hundred years later, no one seems to know; not really.

Switching gears for a moment: let us consider the fact that Buddhist meditation is designed to foster self-transparency to the point that the self disappears, is seen to be an illusion. It is, of course, a path that most people are unaware of, and wouldn’t be interested in pursuing even if they were aware of it. So if we are waiting for a world transformation of consciousness based on individual transformation multiplied billions of times, I suspect we are going to be waiting for a very long time. And in the meantime?

“Meanwhile the world goes on,” wrote the poet Mary Oliver.

“Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.”

A larger world. Maybe this is the field Rumi was talking about.

©Morris Berman, 2026