Pity is no Virtue.
Mohamed went from floor sweeper and wrench cleaner to master technician and team leader in 5 Years
Pity is not a virtue and nothing born of it can be virtuous either.
In my TEDx last year I tried to unpack what I was seeing in the charity space that was actually endangering those charities aimed to aid.
I shared that in the name of compassion, we prescribe pity in a way that disables people. I admitted that “Those of us working in charity and trying to do good, often mislabel people as ''poor” and ''broken”` in an attempt to mobilize compassion from within ourselves and from the pockets of others.
My past hardships make me believe that rather than broken places or impoverished people, it is the way that we’re thinking about people that’s impoverished and the way we’re using compassion that’s broken.
We have to see the strength of those experiencing problems and use charity to pass the baton as a step to self-reliance, not for a daily dose of life support, but to rally people to discover and achieve their best.
I keep philosophizing on this idea and it’s clear: pity is such a huge part of why charity isn’t very charitable.
Pity collapses at the impressions of other people’s woes, looking only at the state a person is in, not the causes. It's a gloominess brought on by the woes of others who we believe are suffering undeservingly, but what good can come from that? Pity is our feeling toward a situation, not the situation. Pity doesn’t help poverty because its aim isn’t to help end poverty. Its aim is to feel gloomy about poverty. (Rehash of Seneca’s “On Clemency”, book 2).
Pity can be a mirror we hold up to see ourselves in–it’s not a lens to see people through. It’s often a projection of our desire to be pitied by others when we feel life isn’t fair–not a means of solving people’s problems. We are surrounded with messages of victimhood while living in the most prosperous contexts in the world…in human history. If we pity ourselves with so much, how much more will pity those with much less?
The real global citizen looks at poverty with an uplifted mind, bringing aid to another’s tears without reveling in their own tears, they’ll take the stranded driver for more fuel, they’ll shelter their neighbors when their heater is out, but they’ll also serve those in need with wisdom. Wisdom supersedes the fickle emotion of pity to provide solutions to problems without the need to soothe ourselves and our desire to be pitied. (Rehash of Seneca’s “On Clemency”, book 2 cntd.)
What we need are the counterbalances of classical virtue–a perspective that balances compassion, charity, and clemency with wisdom, fortitude, and justice.
Two weeks ago I got to deliver a message to 80 employees, from a team of trench diggers to managers of departments with 25 or more people, in a business that’s gone from 1 to nearly 200 employees in the last 10 years. I said: “We at Water4 are not here because we pity you. We are working here because we believe in you. We do not see poverty. We see potential.”
This message brought waves of release and freedom: I saw it ripple first across those who could understand my English, the second wave came as it was translated into their local language.
Pity would not have helped Mohamed, an employee of that business pictured with me above. His first job 5 years ago was sweeping floors and cleaning wrenches. Cleaning wrenches… Not using them. He did not know how to read a tape measure. He did not know how to use any tools. I met him in 2017, 3 weeks after being hired. We sat for an hour on this trip and he shared that he has since taught himself how to read Mandarin Chinese to operate a complex CNC Plasma Machine, has redesigned and innovated our kiosk design in a dozen crucial ways, is an extremely talented welder, leads a staff of 5, and has used his salary to create passive income that’s transforming the life of his family and future. He told me how he’d done this down to the amount of sugar bread and tea he adjusted in his budget each week for his savings and investment plan. He practiced welding with a pencil and paper at home every night. He photocopied a manual in Chinese and used a translator app to learn each symbols meaning… This man didn’t need pity. He just needed opportunity.
To be clear, at Water4 we are using charity born of compassion to soothe the pain of this immediate global water crisis. 1 in 5 children will die from diarrheal disease. We cannot walk by without acting, and acting now. We don’t have time to waste. People need water and they need it now.
We are also using wisdom, fortitude and justice to build a solution that addresses the sources of the problem and solves it forever. You can’t solve poverty, the absence of wealth, without a solution that creates wealth. So we’re creating jobs and training skills while we’re ending the suffering of unsafe water.
Pity is murky, gloomy, and useless for it calls forth no solution to the state that triggered the loathing emotion. On a frigid day, It’s like pouring water onto the logs that contain the potential for warmth that day.
Potential and possibility activate an energy and disrupt the stagnated spirit resulting from prolonged pain. Looking past externals, it focuses on what people can change, rather than pitying what they cannot. This is creative power, this inspires hope and fuels a spirit of discipline and readiness. Potential and possibility enable the use of charity to pass on a fire lit torch of possibility. Charity is a virtue, but pity based charity is a vice– one sure to smother any fire out.
If you want to know the difference between pity and virtuous charity/compassion, here’s a method I use: Virtue looks to the source of the problem and acts on the source with compassion. Pity is feeling sorry because you can't imagine seeing yourself in that situation. So you might hear someone say “oh, i'm grateful I don’t have to live like that, here’s some money” instead of “I can see how this situation led to them being there, let me offer some help.” Pity has the "I" as the center of the story whereas virtuous compassion places the other person and their situation at the center. Pity doesn’t ask questions, virtue does. One seeks to eliminate your worry about your own state, the other seeks to help the other through wisdom and reflection.
So join me and be a Potentialist. A Possibilist. Let’s carry the fire and ignite change. Leave pity behind and join me to disrupt with light.