One might say that Rosenberg’s question is less “how can people become more compassionate?” but rather, “what conditions, both external and internal, interfere with people’s natural capacity to be connected to life and to respond humanely in challenging moments?”

The two questions may appear to be near twins at first glance but they are likely to stimulate different responses and outcomes. The first question will typically prompt people to look inwardly for ways to increase their capacity to respond compassionately. The understanding in this case is that personal, psychological or spiritual work will yield the sought after result. For instance, it’s in vogue these days to teach meditation as a practice to help people become more compassionate. It’s also fashionable to cite scientific research identifying neurological and brain related factors that may inhibit compassion.

While these approaches are not without their benefits, their focus on the individual does not address the larger systemic issues that Marshall refers to time and time again. The fact that people learn to manage and lower their reactive impulses during stressful moments does little to change the dehumanizing effects of the culture itself. It merely makes for a less reactive and more accommodating population. It may in fact be just what the “systemic machine” wants .. that people learn how to self soothe while being subjected to an increasingly dehumanizing regime.

The second question on the other hand of what interferes with people’s natural capacity to be connected to life draws attention to the questionable humanity of the systemic structures that inform our lives. It’s actually a much harder question to wrestle given the longevity and well established momentum of those structures, as well as the fact that most of us were born into these structures and have a hard time pointing to what might be described a real suffering given that we also benefit in a myriad of ways from what is made available to us by virtue of those structures being in place.

Take for instance the advent of smart phones. It’s commonplace to see families dining at home or in restaurants where the children, anywhere from 5 ages and up, are singularly focused on their hand held devices as their parents either speak to each other or are similarly engaged with devices. No one seated at that table is “suffering” per se and yet each is plugged into a social and cultural narrative that was less designed by them than it was designed by technology driven corporations wanting to make a profit.