George Saunders

And I think the answer is yes.

You do have to do both.

There's a beautiful Buddhist teacher named Francesca Fremantle, and she has a talk.

It's on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

And she has the most mind-blowing answer because what she says is,

There's no difference.

If you have compassion for the victims of this cruelty, that's important, of course, protect them.

But if you run around to the other side of the table and you sit, she says, the way she puts it is, when you think about the karmic consequences of the sins they're committing, the harm that they're doing, she says, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

So if you want to help them, if you have any bandwidth for that, then what you would do is stop them within your principles, within your nonviolence, and you stop them

then you save the victims and you save the perpetrators.

So I think in a high realm, it's an identical act.

It's also true, as you said, that these people aren't doing these horribly cruel things out of nowhere.

But again, I think, you know, we'd want to avoid that idiotic compassion of in somehow in our attempt to understand them, we enable them.

That's also a danger of narrating.

Or we excuse them.

Or we excuse them, yes.

But what is the... I think the idea, and again, I get this from writing workshop and from writing.

If you move towards specificity, facile judgment goes away.

So in a workshop, for example, somebody will say, oh, I think your story is boring.

You can't work with that.