The Power of Compassion: Change Yourself, Change the World

How kind. I was recently thinking about an assignment I had put on the back burner because I couldn’t answer the why behind it. But Matthieu Ricard has just answered it in his talk about Compassion, or rather Altruism and extending it globally.
The first point he makes is that there are altruistic people in the world. Since the 19th century psychologists have said that “if you scratch the surface of the altruist, the selfishness will show” and they have been living with and expounded that belief. There is this idea that people give and do so that they can get. Personally I have a bit of paranoia when someone tries to do something for me. I secretly wonder what is in it for them. I think many people have been conditioned towards that mind frame by the “experts” in the field. In any case, Ricard shows through many examples that altruism and compassion exist. But it doesn’t occur on a large enough scale to really make a global impact. The rest of the lecture therefore focused on how to increase it.
One point that he makes is that those who engage in meditation, specifically that which is focused on gratitude and compassion have an increase in brain activity. It doesn’t have to be 60,000 hours of meditation to produce that sort of change. Four weeks, 20 minutes per day already produces a structural change in the brain, the hippocampus grows larger. But this change in the brain happens regardless of what we put our mental energy towards. When taxi drivers were studied, their hippocampus was also larger because they set their minds to learning streets by heart. But how does greater capacity for altruism on an individual level translate to the world?
What can we do?
We cannot wait 50,000 years and hope for an altruistic gene because it will be too late to deal with the social/environmental ills. But we can help culture evolve and Ricard gives us several ideas of how.
1.) We need to enhance cooperation
a. Schools and workplaces. There can be some competition between companies, but it should never exist within companies.
2.) Sustainable harmony
a. Reducing inequality now
b. Keeping in harmony with the environment for the future
3.) Caring economics
a. Care about poverty in the midst of plenty and the common good
4.) Local commitment and global responsibility
5.) Extend altruism to the other 1.3 million species-they are co-citizens