On Psychomachia, General Distress and the Calculation of Compassion

If there’s one thing that bothers me as I sit on my sofa minding my own business on an intriguing Monday evening, it’s having to listen to my wife listening to some other bloke’s interpretation of reality on the television. Perhaps it’s some deep, instinctual sensation of competition kicking in my psyche, wishing to proffer some kind of protective system on the thought stream of my soul mate to help her evade nasty blokes trying to sell dubious vinyl.

Of course, I can’t provide 24 hour entertainment for her amusement, so being able to hand off to supporting acts does provide a degree of respite after burning through several bags of lapsang tea trying to somehow crack the big mystery of life day after day.

However it is interesting to think about some of these thoughts that arise in the mind and try to work out where they actually come from, if there is a truly free will sending these ideas to my consciousness computer screen and even if there isn’t, would I even be able to tell?

Hence recent reflections on Psychomachia, which is a brutal medieval poem by a chap called Prudentius. I’m not a Latin reader, so I had to search for some form of reputable translation, and settled on a nun from 50’s America. I have no way of verifying what the text of Psychomachia is banging on about, but I tell you, this translation was something else.

Here we have brutal spiritual war, where the vices and the virtues go head to head and fight until the virtues inevitably win. If you can imagine pride being beheaded by humility, its like that throughout. Brutal stuff. An epic poem, is how the genre is referred to.

As a quick aside, its fun how in all literature the virtues always win. Its like you can humour a vice for a while, but then once the charm wears off and you realise that you’re better off without it, you quickly shed it and move on to higher ideals. The vice tries its best to convince you otherwise, but it never stands a chance in the face of truth.

But I could go and do some kind of interesting career retrospect of Prudentius and what he was going through when he sat down to write his poem, or I could do an investigation into my translating nun, but I suppose that’s only really interesting to the enthusiast and, as I understand it, truly skillful blog writing should ensure that the blog is universal and can be read in any historical context in which it’s found.

I’m terrible at SEO, but that’s only because SEO lends itself to terrible blog writing.

In my current context, the world is at war, the bad guys are winning and the average bloke is having a pretty hard time of it. That sounds like every context. Which is then incredibly interesting as we can then come to some kind of idea that things never change, but the contextual wrapping changes constantly.

Which is linked to a portion of the title of this blog – General Distress. I imagine that a lot of people view life through a lens of General Distress. You wake up, you’re groggy, you may have a headache, you know that you have to ‘do’ something, and you ought to go and ‘do’ it posthaste. Throughout the rest of the day you encounter various scenarios that cause varying levels of General Distress.

You then get home and open a letter saying your bills are going up and turn on the news and there’s some bloke going on about how he has it worse then you, and needs a couple of your hard earned currency.

You’re a human being, and you have a predisposition to compassion so you want the best for the TV guy, but at the same time you’ve grown wise to the ways of the world and know that situations tend to be wildly complicated and there’s no way for you to actually know if the TV guy is acting in your own best interest.

And everything you look at, there’s a new scenario and a new narrative going on that purports to take precedence over your own private circumstances and its enough to drive you mad. When is someone gonna take a look at my situation? When is someone going to fight for the social justice of my own private ailments?

I suppose the ultimate lesson is that nobody will, unless you hire a lawyer!

But joking aside, this issue of compassion that arises…its a tough one to crack, because the predisposition of a person is to help everybody and make sure that no one person on the Earth gets into trouble. Yet there can often be a lack of compassion reflected back at the person who dares to question the conventional narrative replaying infinitely on the television screen.

It all leads to a very nasty scenario and very poor discourse all round. Everyone has the right to determine what they do with their time, and all people are deserving of support. If I place this paragraph in the context of April 2022: if a person is not willing to countenance that one actor in a theatre of war is acting in their own best interest, and has their own set of justifications that feel like the righteous word of God in their own experience, then we’re not gonna get anywhere closer to living in some kind of utopia.

The eternal jetfuel of conflict is the concept of justice. Its why lawyers are so wealthy. Outside of the remit of the divine, the only form of human justice will always only only ever be subjective. If you say otherwise, you’re making it up and putting yourself on a pedestal above another person. I don’t know about you, but I’m not predisposed to any thoughts of supremacy, and I won’t tolerate any thoughts or sympathies toward that idea in my daily life. It doesn’t matter how much you feel you may have suffered, we’ve all suffered through our own personal psychomachias and we all bear the scars of war.

Where this leaves us is in a new understanding that we’re all doing our best to get through each day to the best of our abilities, and indeed in the state of our minds, the decisions we decide to make are the result of our mind making a series of thoughts and deductions that result in the final action. In hindsight we may think that those actions were daft, but in the heat of the moment, it felt like the right thing to do.

If we can conclude that we are indeed all one, but at the same time uniquely one, we can go forward and expand our net of compassion to extend to all people at all times, forming the foundational DNA to destroy the concept of war for good.