Is There a Fixed Amount of Suffering in the World? – Dialectic Two Step

Estimated reading time: 7 minute(s)

Question: If so, do you think that if you evade your share of suffering that someone else will have to suffer more?

Response:  But first, I should be clear about what suffering means. We should distinguish it from pain, sickness, and death. These are not choices. We will have to endure all three in our lives and we often have little control over them. If your question was about pain, the sum of pain in a system would need to remain constant. But, humans are terrible reporters of experience; especially about pain. We are also unable to directly experience the sensations of others. So it seems the experiment fails in the design. We have no reliable way to measure it.

If your question is about pain, I don’t think we can reach an answer.

If your question is about suffering, I don’t think we can reach an answer either. Here’s why.

Suffering is different. From a Buddhist perspective, suffering is subjective. It’s a function of our preferences and aversions. We suffer when we’re in situations we don’t like. We suffer when we lose the people and things that we love. We suffer when things don’t turn out like we want them to.

This is what I meant when I said suffering is subjective. These preferences and aversions color our otherwise morally neutral world. Things that we love aren’t in and of themselves good. They are good because we like them. The same applies to the things we dislike. They are bad because we don’t like them.

So if we examine it source, it is boundless and varies based on our temperament. It seems unpredictable, even random. Similar to pain, it would be impossible to measure the sum of suffering in any system.

So we’re at a dead end. But, there’s good news. I don’t think it matters. I don’t think knowing the answer offers any benefit. The Buddhist test for not mattering is whether or not answering the question would somehow reduce your suffering.

Let’s do a thought experiment on this. If there was a finite amount of suffering and you were to evade your share, it follows that you would be increasing the pain and suffering of others. But as I concluded above, we have no way of knowing whether or not the balance has been shifted one way or another. I can’t tell and neither can you. The only thing we can know is our own. The only thing that we can do to directly reduce suffering is to reduce our own. The only way to directly reduce pain is to avoid intentionally harming ourselves or others.

So my recommendation is to move on from this question and focus on things you can do something about.

Dialectic Two-Step  is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio

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The post Is There a Fixed Amount of Suffering in the World? – Dialectic Two Step written by Andrew Furst appeared on Andrew Furst.