The video addresses how easily people can switch off their compassion and the challenges faced in training counselors to empathize with a wide range of clients, regardless of personal feelings. It emphasizes understanding the core human being sitting in front of them and acknowledging how phobias or disapproval can interfere with a counselor's ability to empathize. This discussion expands to the global proliferation of hate and how people in power manipulate sentiments against different groups.

The speaker examines three main factors influencing compassion: proximity, worthiness, and hurt. They argue that compassion diminishes with physical or emotional distance, perceived unworthiness, and personal hurt. Real-life examples illustrate how ordinary people demonstrate extraordinary compassion, emphasizing its fragile nature. The speaker also points out that many atrocities are committed by ordinary people, suggesting that circumstances bring out the darker side of individuals.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. compassion [kəmˈpæʃn] - (noun) - A deep awareness of and sympathy for another's suffering, with a desire to alleviate it. - Synonyms: (empathy, sympathy, kindness)

I can switch off my compassion like that and make the world a darker place.

2. hypervigilant [ˌhaɪpərˈvɪdʒələnt] - (adjective) - Extremely or excessively alert or watchful. - Synonyms: (alert, watchful, observant)

When I was out in the world as my daughter, I realized that I'd become hypervigilant.

3. visceral [ˈvɪsərəl] - (adjective) - Relating to deep inward feelings rather than intellect. - Synonyms: (instinctual, emotional, profound)

It's a kind of visceral connection whereby seeing them hurt actually causes you pain.

4. proliferation [prəˌlɪfəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - Rapid increase in numbers. - Synonyms: (expansion, spread, multiplication)

There seems to be a major proliferation of hate in the world at the moment.

5. benevolent [bəˈnɛvələnt] - (adjective) - Well-meaning and kindly. - Synonyms: (kind, charitable, generous)

Most of us want to see ourselves as benevolent human beings.

6. atrocities [əˈtrɒsɪtiz] - (noun) - Extremely wicked or cruel acts, typically involving violence or injury. - Synonyms: (wickedness, brutality, cruelty)

Most of the atrocities in the world have been committed by very ordinary people.

7. empathize [ˈɛmpəˌθaɪz] - (verb) - To understand and share the feelings of another. - Synonyms: (understand, sympathize, feel)

Secondly, I need to help them to empathize with others no matter what.

8. retaliation [rɪˌtæliˈeɪʃən] - (noun) - The action of returning a military attack; counterattack. - Synonyms: (revenge, retribution, counterattack)

If our child is repeatedly rude, disobedient, and lashes out at us, we can want to do something in retaliation.

9. persecute [ˈpɜːrsɪˌkjuːt] - (verb) - Subject (someone) to hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of their race or political or religious beliefs. - Synonyms: (harass, oppress, mistreat)

It's easy for us to persecute people that remind us of parts of ourselves.

10. concentric [kənˈsentrɪk] - (adjective) - Denoting circles, arcs, or other shapes that share the same center. - Synonyms: (centralized, coextensive, parallel)

It's almost as if we've got concentric circles going around us.

Why do we hate? - Jon Wilson Cooper - TEDxSt Albans

I've got a serious problem. I can switch off my compassion like that and make the world a darker place. And I suspect so can you. I've been training Counselors for over 23 years now, which amounts to over 400 people. I support my students to prepare to work with an incredible range of potential clients with an almost unimaginable list of issues that those clients might bring. The main skill that a counsellor needs to have is the ability to deeply understand other people's emotional experience.

This presents. Oh, this presents two challenges developmentally. First, I need to help my students to be able to sit with incredibly strong emotion. Secondly, I need to help them to empathize with others no matter what. It doesn't matter whether or not we like the person we're sitting in front of. We might not approve of them, we might not like the things they've done. However, it's only necessary to have an empathy for the core human being sitting in front of you. These challenges can be quite difficult because most people have a degree of fear and emotion, even phobia at times. And also we find certain people really difficult to empathize with because we really disapprove of how they live or we don't understand them and we don't take the effort to find out more about them.

It's easy for us to switch off compassion, particularly if the other person is very different from us. And that tip can go into hate. There seems to be a major proliferation of hate in the world at the moment, and there's a lack of compassion in quite extreme situations that we're seeing around the globe. And it seems very easy for people with power and influence to actually manipulate us into blaming certain groups of people for the struggles that we're facing today.

I want to talk about hate and how we come to hate and what we can do about it. On the flip side, I've worked with people from all walks of life to help them to learn to love themselves and each other better. I don't mean the kind of conditional, controlling, at times, romantic love, more the kind of love that one has for a child or a best friend. The kind of love where the other person's safety, happiness and well being is almost as important as your own. It's a kind of visceral connection whereby seeing them hurt actually causes you pain.

I've learned over the years that the love and compassion that people can have for each other can cause people to do extraordinary things. Ordinary people can take incredible risks, risking serious harm to themselves, even death, to try to protect another human being. A really poignant example was on the 29th of July this year in Southport, UK, a young man attacked a dance class with a knife. He killed three children and he hurt eight others. One of the organizers of the dance class, Leanne Lewis, stepped forward to try to protect those children at huge personal cost. And they weren't even her kids.

When I became a father for the first time, I recognized a profound change in me. When I was out in the world as my daughter, I realized that I'd become hypervigilant, that I thought to myself, if a vehicle was to suddenly hurtle towards her, I would act without any hesitation to save her life with my partner. However, I think about it first. What had happened is my system has effectively been rewired to protect my daughter. The notion of compassion is so central to us as human beings that that the word humanity itself can mean compassion.

Being compassionate means wanting to minimize the suffering of others. And we want to go out of our way to try to reduce or heal the hurt that other people may have endured. We're born with the ability to attach and love others because we need each other to survive. Most of us want to see ourselves as benevolent human beings, and we'd hate to see ourselves as the opposite. Cruel, unkind, indifferent, inhumane. However, this dark side, I believe, exists within all of us and can come out given the right set of circumstances.

Most of the atrocities in the world have been committed by very ordinary people, but we prefer to think of those people as being very different from us. I'm not like that. However, most Nazis were extremely ordinary men and women. We need to have the courage to look at that in ourselves and own it, know that we can do this and know how we do it. So compassion, as well as being an incredibly powerful motivator that we can do incredible things, take extreme risks to look after another human being, it can also be very fragile. It seems it can disappear completely.

I think that compassion is conditional, and I believe it relies on three basic conditions. Proximity, worthiness, and hurt. Firstly, proximity. It seems that caring for others can be pretty automatic. When we can see ourselves in them or when they're close to us. We feel a little less urgency the further we go out. And if somebody's very different to us in terms of geographical difference or difference from who we are, then the urgency seems to diminish. It's almost as if we've got concentric circles going around us. So we're very responsive to the people that we're closest to. Slightly less responsive Maybe to friends and extended family, a little less concerned about neighbors and work colleagues. And the further out we go, the less we care about them.

So that's one factor is degree of separation, worthiness. We can often lose our compassion for others when we believe that they're suffering. They brought it on themselves because they've made bad decisions. Maybe they deserve what they get. Or we don't understand their decisions and we don't take the effort to find out more about them so we can develop our empathy. I've worked with many addicts over my lifetime and every one of them was using substances to manage their feelings and every one of them had significant trauma in their lives. One ex heroin user said to me, it's no accident that I was using the strongest painkiller known to man.

We have a tendency as a society to blame the addict and say, what's wrong with you? Rather than what happened to you. The third one hurt. It's perhaps the most understandable reason why we withdraw our compassion is when we feel hurt by people. Even people we love can hurt us to the extent that we become enraged and we want to hurt them back. If our child is repeatedly rude, disobedient, and lashes out at us, we can want to do something in retaliation.

So what we do is we take away something they like. We restrict their freedom. But what is the urge to punish if it's not the urge to cause some pain? Hurt people, hurt people and the cycle continues. If the people who have hurt us don't seem to show us any empathy, then what we can do is we can want to force them to feel by inflicting the similar sort of trauma on them that they've inflicted on us. This is the motivation behind revenge.

It also occurs in international conflict where one side kills the other side's civilians because they killed our civilians. We'll show you how this feels. We're going to make you feel something here. We see this in all large scale conflicts where there's a split enough between us and them and we lose compassion for them. It seems quite acceptable in war to kill citizens of a particular region purely because of where they happen to have been born. We see this again and again. Examples from recent history are Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, in Rwanda between Tutsi and Hutu. Each side tended to demonize the other so they could justify to themselves acts of extreme barbarism.

There are of course, times when compassion isn't appropriate. Sometimes we have to stop people doing bad things, so we have to be very robust in tackling them also, we all have limits to how much compassion we can give. compassion carries a cost, especially in terms of what we might give to other people. And we might feel that we have limited resources, so we start to cut back. I'd like to help, but I don't have enough for me and mine.

Also, being compassionate carries a huge emotional impact on us. It's really hard to be with people in pain, and over time, we can start to withdraw, especially if we can't stop the suffering. It's natural for us to start to protect ourselves, to shut down, withdraw. What we can do is develop compassion fatigue, and we can start to distance ourselves. So what we do is we emotionally abandon people in need.

Of course, there's some suffering that we can't stop, but we know from our own experience that when we're in pain and struggling, actually having somebody there who cares actually really soothes us. It might not solve the problem, but we feel better knowing that people care about us. On the other hand, having nobody there really exacerbates their desperation. To take an extreme example, we might be with someone who's dying. We can't stop them dying, but we could at least hold them so that they're not alone on their final journey.

There's times when we're not even compassionate towards ourselves, treating ourselves less than we would treat a good friend. I'm the director of a small company, and there's times when I've caught myself treating myself in a way I would never treat one of my staff. This is an internal problem. There's a conflict inside, and we need to deal with that conflict, otherwise it can spill out into the world. It's easy for us to persecute people that remind us of parts of ourselves, so we need to do the work.

It's really challenging to look at how we can switch off our compassion. It's absolutely essential that we do, though, so we can build better relationships and that we can learn to help those people that we find difficult to love because they probably need it the most. We need to dare to challenge ourselves and each other when we're living without empathy. Living without compassion disconnects us from each other, so it harms us and the whole world. What we need to do is do the work internally. Look inside ourselves as to how we switch off our compassion so that we might learn how to switch it on again and throw light into the darkness.

Thank you.

COMPASSION, PSYCHOLOGY, HUMAN BEHAVIOR, EDUCATION, LEADERSHIP, MOTIVATION, TEDX TALKS