George Saunders

You know, he does need some help.

But neither of these people is willing to give it to him.

The Frenchman comes in so hot and so angry that anybody would resist him.

And Jill assuages in such a sort of cozy way that nobody could take correction from her either.

So Boone floats through, and in a sense, he's not saved, actually.

And... That's the book.

That's the book.

Yeah, no, it is.

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.