Vices Presenting as Virtues

In his 2022 The Myth of Normal, thinker and physician Gabor Mate observes that vices often masquerade as virtues, not only in the behaviors of individuals but in societally widespread beliefs and perceptions.

Roughly 2400 years earlier, philosopher and physician’s son Aristotle wrote of similar phenomena in his then-unpublished notes concerning ethics, character, and happiness. A display of rashness or foolhardiness in the face of danger, for example, is likely to be mistaken for courage. In terms of beliefs, what people often believe courage to be is in reality a form of foolishness or of insensitivity to danger. Similarly, a failure to become angered, in a situation where anger is actually appropriate, may be mistaken for virtuous gentleness or moderateness.

Anger

Although if compelled to list anger either as skillful or unskillful, we would surely have to categorize it as the latter, “anger” is really a complex and varied set of phenomena with manifold possible functions, disfunctions, and outcomes. Often these are distortive, unskillful, and generative of suffering and regret.

There are other elements within anger also. In Lovingkindness, philosopher and teacher Sharon Salzberg identifies a few of these: Anger “has incredible energy” and “can impel us to let go of ways we may be inappropriately defined by the needs of others; it can teach us to say no. […] Anger has the power to pierce through the obvious to things that are more hidden. This is why anger may be transmuted to wisdom.”

False Compassion

Compassion is one virtue which is probably widely misunderstood, with many instances of actual compassion not being recognized, while many less-than-virtuous states, impulses, and acts are wrongly perceived and labeled as compassionate. A certain false notion of compassion can sometimes be enacted in ways which might be characterized as narcissistic or codependent (not necessarily in a “clinical” sense of those terms, but still in an accurate sense). Briefly, this false compassion can be enacted in the repeated crossing of appropriate, healthy personal boundaries.

Compassion and Personal Boundaries: No Conflict At All

Anger at Compassion?

A person who has been too often on the receiving end of such behaviors may, unfortunately, end up experiencing feelings of anger at the thought that compassion for others will be expected of them. This despite the fact that they are not in truth a dispositionally uncompassionate person. How to make sense of that? Has their adverse experience turned them somehow uncompassionate?

Actually, no.

Anger Arising from Real Compassion

First, the “compassion” which they anticipate others expecting of them is not compassion. It is one of those vices masquerading as virtues, a false idea of compassion and a performance of something other than compassion.

Second, the anger arises from the anticipation, or the the implicit expectation that one will or should allow one’s healthy boundaries to be crossed while welcoming the transgression and affirming that it is not what it actually is.

From those two considerations, we can see that the feeling of anger in fact has its roots in genuine compassion for oneself. Furthermore, compassion for oneself is the basis for wider compassion. Thus what may superficially appear as anger, ill will, and aversion toward compassion, is in reality a manifestation of core genuine compassion.
Such anger intuitively cuts through the deception that welcoming repeated insistent violations of appropriate personal boundaries while deluding oneself about their nature is compassionate and appropriate.

Awakened Nature

I find it interesting to note how well this squares with the thesis that our root nature is “awakened mind,” including the ineradicable potential of compassion, springing forth originally from compassion for oneself.

Buddha Nature, The Path, Impermanence: Reflecting On the Need for Something to Rely On

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SeekerFive creates expressive photographic artwork: a few selections on Etsy at elementalexpressive.etsy.com.

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SeekerFive is gradually collecting and developing resources to aid in philosophical practice and study at philosophicadvising.com.