Thoughts on Pain and Democracy

Hurting is an intensively subjective experience yet it can also be a social event. If you bleed or cry, other people naturally seem to invest emotions either in replusion or empathic bonding. If you are sick, others can see you are in a state, even if they do not acknowledge it. Most people have emotional reactions to others hurt but often sense a need to blunt this reaction.

We have contrived ways of dealing with, even creating, hurt.
In the military, trainers have to "work around" the recruit's genetics and socialization that make him or her not want to inflict hurt. Our abhorance of hurting others seems to be a biologic drive as well as cultural learning.

Insurance companies depersonalize hurt by quantifying it.

Hurting is an intense sensation that can teach. It isn't the only sensation that teaches but it may be the most immediate and powerful. An appropriately aware being must be present at the time the pain occurs in order for the powerful lesson to be learned. This may be oneself, I am alone and hurting, or oneself and others, as in; I am hurting and others see me hurting. Out of the pain we learn of our humanity and get skills to survive. Pain can teach us most efficiently when one person experiences pain but when there are other sensitive beings who observe the painful event. Communicating one's pain has a built in multiplier effect because many people can learn how to better survive from one hurtful lesson without themselves being debilitated. I call this useful pain.

Pain is such a powerful force that most of us have many natural ways to insulate ourselves from the experience of our own and others pain. One such way to protect ourselves is to create institutions or social conventions that give us a feeling of safety amidst messages of pain. This may have a survival advantage for our society even though it requires that those who are debilitated with pain may be excluded from the circle of protection. Social institutions can make us feel secure and feeling secure means, in part, avoiding the unwanted feelings of pain. We have invested ourselves in social institutions and we usually believe that our institutions need to survive as if it is its own kind of two faced being. I seek the benevolent face when I feel threatened and I see the malevolent face when I realise I am removed from it's protective arms. To keep the benevolent face toward me I need to deny or blunt the reality that other people are hurting but I also lose the opportunity to learn lessons of survival as a result. Denial of the my own or others experience of hurt is one way that pain becomes pointless. Having others deny the felt reality of my pain through social conventions or institutions invites me to react in anger.

Openess to others pain might be a way of defining progress in human kind but is the protectiveness we crave of our cultural conventions inherently a barrier to our social evolution? Could it be that we have a democratic deficiency arising from an inequity of felt pain? An inequity between those of us who see the benevolent face of social conventions and those of us outside the circle who see a face of evil?

Pain can create the conditions for kinder social inventions. Eventually, communicating pain can cause us to choose a road in which we achieve greater social good. Evolutionary fitness might be another way to say it. This is point of pain. We can allow ourselves to become lost in isolated hurt or we can allow others to know our hurt. We can use pain to learn or we are likely to focus our destructive mood on those we believe to be inside the isolating circle.

So what does this mean for those of us who invest in ignoring or creating hurt in the name of our social conventions?