Part of me is still amazed by the everyday absurdity of most self-professed "people of compassion". Their thought process is far from what I consider rational.

Let us take the subject of crime. The acts of crime are generally cruel as are the punishments. By punishing such acts though, the total cruelty of the crimes drops due to less frequent occurrence. The use of coercion may seem to be cruel but overall the effect is to make life more livable for the weakest. The in low crime areas, poor businessmen may still sell without fear of robbery, the elderly can go out and lead a more active and hopeful life, and children can play and experience more of the world without parents rationally locking them indoors for their own safety.

Order is essential for most aspects of what we consider civilized life. Other aspects also include the reduction in cruelty when possible. None but a sadist would desire more cruelty than necessary but the disagreements are generally over what is necessary for what. If the concern is over allowing people freedom to travel around their city, laws punishing assault would be in order. If the goal is to allow different neighborhoods to develop separately, they would see no problem with an assault of an outsider. The goal of reducing cruelty calls for the least severe punishment that gets the job done. A person focused on separate development would consider a prison sentence for assault to be excessive and thus sadistic. A person who believes in a unitary city would consider beating someone up for trying to buy a house to be excessive as well.

The consideration then is in how one approaches a situation to reduce unneeded cruelty. The "Compassionate" argue against prison discipline despite the preferences of most prisoners to live under the stern (sometimes brutal) rule of the warders instead of the consistently brutal rule of their fellow inmates. The compassion is made manifest in the periodic murders of prisoners by prisoners in gang violence continuing in prison.

Such compassion is more concerned with the procedure of law (a good thing to prevent random acts or some deliberate miscarriages of it) in cases involving a violent crime with a harsh punishment (imprisonment or death) than for child custody cases where the crime is usually minor and the punishment excruciating (almost all parents agree that separation from their child is more painful than death). The frequent violations of procedure and the extremely incompetent nature of the US child protection bureaucracies warrant inquiry. They go by various names but frequently employ people of little intelligence whose sole claim to employment is that they are willing to sit through the inanities of bureaucratic life. Such organizations often degenerate into job schemes for the least skilled and such people get some petty fulfillment by flaunting their power.

This comes in many ways. Humiliating a family by driving up in a marked vehicle (knowing that it will render neighbors suspicious of wrongdoing even in the most innocent of cases), making decisions without actually examining the subjects in question (frequently the worst of the lot simply talk to the parent and leave without even asking to see the supposed object of their investigation), and using their bureaucratic-knife-fighting skills to press an obviously innocent case as a test of their power when the victimized family has no recourse to the courts.

Technically, they can go to a family court but the judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and assorted activists, bureaucrats, and assorted ilk all know each other violating one means of assuring a fair trial, anonymity not in identification but in interests. The entire system is incestuous but the poor education of most of their victims or their timidity makes them unlikely to carry it even that far. These are what some might otherwise characterize as "the weak".

The interest of the "compassionate" disappears for those trapped in such a system pleading for a more uniform legal system where the same standards of evidence would be used as in a criminal trial. The poor, uneducated, and timid are usually used as justifications for the conspicuous acts of government compassion advocated for by the "compassionate" but the actual plight of many is ignored.

Why? Their compassion is naught but an outgrowth of their selfishness. They are self-obsessed but some dim glimmer recognizes it and attempts to correct it. The healthy state of balance in a human being entails some concern for others. There is a phenomenon that people carry on their personal struggles into the public sphere. People who have negative views of another ethnic group might take up their cause in politics or society as a means of purging their own bigotry. The individual selfishness then gets translated into the public sphere as a call for collective actions and concern. One example might be that Jakie Kennedy was a strong advocate of government largess but she herself was very careful with money.

The resulting system is one in which parents cannot raise children without the collective call for "society" doing something to help. Society does not mean private associations helping bring food or clothes. It does not mean home-school coops. It means government intervention. The upside is the vast resources of the government. The downside is that all government activity is essentially based on coercion. Even if actions are voluntary, the taxes to support it are not.

Much as aristocratic Romans would compete for the loyalty of their patronage circles and the glory of their political careers by acts of largess. The "compassionate" do the same in their circles but merely to maintain the lie to themselves that they are not unhealthy people who only care for themselves.

In this state, they care more for the sentiment expressed than the truth or effect. It is in this vein that Oprah has become so popular with the obligatory nods of commiseration or agreement and the murmurs of disapproval for anyone who challenged the atmosphere of therapeutic agreement by actually invoking facts and judgments. It is also in a more political environment that one man praised Ted Kennedy for his stand against welfare reform. Ted Kennedy expressed outrage at the idea on the grounds that it would cause suffering for single poor mothers who could not get a job. The eventual statistics showed his fears to but unwarranted but the man praising Kennedy did so because this mistake was one on behalf of compassion.

Such compassion might be seen more clearly in the welder who is given the rest of the day off and who in his excitement forgets to weld part of a bridge support. The concern that might have motivated the foreman to give the man time off might be sound but the consequences of a bridge collapse are far worse than his individual problem.

Such compassion does not prioritize because priorities conflict with comfort. One would rather live in a society with less "compassion" unless one were one who lived by guile. As it stands, that is exactly what rent-seeking is. Seeking to manipulate the government or other large concerns in order to support an unprofitable endeavor.

This much should be obvious but sadly there are many of genuine goodwill who simply follow the trail of "compassionate" topics because they lack the interest or imagination to evaluate the priorities of actually helping people.