Ulysses S. Grant’s Story of Compassion and The Cold Truths About Compassion Fatigue
General Ulysses S. Grant is a complex figure in the minds of Americans. Some historians claim Grant was a drunk, and politicians from his era slandered him as such. One politician named Alexander McClure accused Grant of being a lush directly to Lincoln. McClure begged Lincoln to dismiss him, but President Lincoln answered that he couldn't spare this man, as he fights. According to newspapers, Lincoln was also reported saying he would send whatever whiskey Grant was drinking to every General and his army because Grant was so good at making war. Grant himself told his wife that he was sober as a deacon, no matter what was said.
Other history sources claim that Grant, like Lincoln and Tecumseh Sherman, suffered from depression and that Grant was an average military student at best. They also said that Grant was cruel as a Civil War General, that he was bloodthirsty, vicious, and that if it weren't for the war, Grant would be impoverished and selling firewood in the streets of St. Louis. Regardless of how he got there and how many rumors were true, when General Grant came to the peace table, he found compassion. In fact, the most remarkable part of Grant’s compassion might stem from his personal flaws, not in spite of them. Grant has been plucked from a life of poverty and dropped into a terrible conflict. When he finally fought his way to the peace table to end the Civil War, he found himself sitting across from Robert E. Lee, a wealthy, educated gentleman. Robert E. Lee was born the son of a Virginian Governor, attended West Point Military Academy with Grant, and arrived at their meeting in a new pristine uniform. Mind you, Grant was still in his muddy field uniform. If his vicious reputation was to be believed, Grant was about to crush the confederates under the union boot. But instead, Grant talked about their shared experience during the war and spoke cordially with Robert E Lee for about half an hour before Lee's surrender was even brought up. Grant even admitted that he was embarrassed to talk of surrender, but they had business to get out of the way.
Two sides of the aisle would be too generous, a way to describe how these men came together. Lee and Grant had been trying to kill each other for the past four years. So, when Lee sheepishly admitted to needing a favor from Grant to save his starving confederate soldiers who wouldn't make it home without aid, Grant showed compassion. Grant ordered 25,000 rations to be sent to the hungry confederates who hadn't eaten in several days. Grants also sent further instructions to his officers that any confederate soldier who owned a horse or mule could keep it to make farming, plowing, and peace easier when they got home. For Grant's reputation of being such a hard-drinking bastard on the battlefield, the level of compassion he showed was enough to convince Robert E. Lee that the best course of action was for his men to return home and for everyone to resume their life as American citizens.
After the first Covid stimulus went out in March of 2020, politicians began asking what happens if more money is needed? The overwhelming answer from the republican-led house was no more stimulus before November, meaning they didn't want to send out another round of payments before the election. In response, several news sources started talking about a phenomenon known as compassion fatigue. Basically, the news was accusing politicians of becoming numb to the number of people who are dying or being evicted because things have been so awful for so long their nerves had become deadened to their voters' suffering. Today, we want to get to the bottom of compassion and compassion fatigue, and as to politically independent podcasters, we're taking a hard look at three myths that might seem to be under suspicion, even now after the second Covid relief bill was just passed.
Myth 1: When do we become numb to numbers? When does the death toll rise too high for us to visualize its meaning? How many people have to die for compassion fatigue to set in?
Joe: When you think of compassionate figures in history, do you think of Mother Teresa? Who's somebody else you think of that has done a lot of good for people?
Todd: Well, I think of her because she's the first one that pops into everybody's mind. Probably Gandhi too.
Joe: When we started researching this episode, I specifically looked for people that shouldn't have been compassionate - people like in our narrative where Grant just got done fighting his way through one of the most brutal wars in history yet still showed compassion. Politicians from both sides of the aisle don't seem to have too much of that.
Since we started recording, the current Covid death numbers are 544,000 in the US. We can kind of put this number in a bucket. There is something that takes place in the mind where we start becoming numb by numbers. The more numbers there are, the more effective it is that you become numb to it. This comes from a Psychology Today article talking about Covid and notes National Geographic on why our minds cannot make sense of the enormous death toll. She wrote a story about how a single tragic death evokes waves of sadness and emotion for us. We focus on individual details of somebody's life circumstances, their death, and we put ourselves into it. It's stories where we can pinpoint an individual and humanize them; that's where we can feel compassion.
A study back in 2014 talked about how compassion diminishes rapidly after one more person is added to a story. So, when we get above the number of one, we stop feeling compassion as hard. If you watch politics or interviews, that's really evident. People don't look at a group of victims and say that's awful. They will pick somebody out from the crowd that looks like them and say that is awful. They will fixate on one person from a tragic incident, and that will stick in their minds. I remember seeing pictures during the war in the Middle East, and I remember doing the same thing. I would hear politicians talk about the need for more and more troops on the ground. It wouldn't affect me until I saw one person crying in the streets around demolished buildings. That's when it would get to me.
In the news, they don't show you a hundred pictures of people who died from something. They show you one person's grandparent, and they fixate on that. They know that a one-person story will hit harder than two, three, or ten. The article also talks about the way our neurons fire. When you have a neuron firing, it signals from one brain cell/neuron to the next. Overall, there is a gap that the electrical signal has to travel between, which is two synapses through a neurotransmitter. This basically means that a spark happens on one part of your brain and travels to the next part. It causes a chemical reaction that slows the next synapse that travels the same direction. So, if you imagine a spark going down a wire every time another spark goes down, that wire becomes stiffer. It doesn't allow things to travel as quickly. In fact, it dulls it. Compassion fatigue sets in when you hit that circuit over and over. Now, if I tell you about one sad person who died from Covid, you'll feel sad. If I tell you repeatedly, that spark will travel the same path that many times and every time it does, it stiffens. It's like quicksand. This is how our brain works. Our brains are built to adapt as well. If you see your neighbor eaten by a lion, that's horrific. But if you see a neighbor eaten by a lion every morning, then you will adapt. Your brain will get used to it, and you won't react as harshly.
Now I want to get into the prefrontal cortex. This comes from a 2020 study that talked about brain imaging evidence and why numbers numb us. In summary, he said that the media medial prefrontal cortex was activated more by events involving a single person than multiple people. That is the scientific evidence that we can't really trust our moral intuitions.
Myth 2: Compassion is this the sole domain of humans, right? Do other animals feel sad for each other's misfortunes, or are they literally crying crocodile tears?
How much compassion do people feel for animals, and how much do animals feel for humans? Is this a universal thing between creatures? For starters, have you ever heard the term crocodile tears? Usually, it's used for somebody who is pretending to feel compassion. It turns out that crocodiles actually do cry when they eat, but it's not tears. It's just a defense mechanism. Now, maybe not crocodiles, but other animals definitely do feel compassion. We talked a couple of weeks back about Koko the gorilla and that she was really into kittens. When her cat died, she expressed sadness about the death. So, if you ever wondered if animals feel genuine compassion, this is a prime example of yes.
We also have evidence that pretty much all other pack animals have these same responses, such as seals, manatees, horses, dingoes, dogs, house cats, and giraffes. You will also see elephants in documentaries carrying bones of their dead. BBC Earth had a great article called The Truth About Animal Grief where they talked about 15 dolphins slowing down and escorting a mother dolphin who was carrying her dead calf. Another example is ducks. I never associated ducks with being compassionate, but there was a case of two ducks that were rescued from a farm who became friends at the sanctuary. When one of the ducks died, the other one laid its head on the corpse for hours. All in all, most creatures on earth have the ability for compassion; whether or not they show it is up to the individual. Pretty much anything that has a limbic system seems to be able to feel compassion.
At some point, we asked the question if humans feel more compassion for animals than they do people. And not just their own animals because we all feel compassion for our own pets. There was a study in Psychology Today where they gave fake news reports to 256 college students. It was about descriptions of victims of a faked attack. The victim would be one of two humans: a one-year-old infant or a 30-year-old adult. Another scenario was the victim was one of two dogs: a puppy or a 6-year-old adult dog. The study showed that the puppy, the older dog, and the baby were equally upsetting. According to the study, anything that is unable to defend itself got a similar or the same empathetic. The fact that adult crime victims receive less empathy than children, puppies, or full-grown dog victims suggests they are seen as dependent and vulnerable.
Myth 3. How does compassion die? Is there such a thing as a scarcity mindset? Furthermore, which human instinct is stronger - the instinct to reach down and pull up the unfortunate up, or the instinct of pulling the ladder up behind us?
Do you think that there is a preference for the upper classes to sort of have less compassion for the lower class? Do you think that's a real thing? You see those upper-class people being compassionate and willing to do whatever they could for their families. But the same people who own companies will pay the minimum wage that they can get away with and show literally no compassion for their people that made them rich. During a recent episode we did about American wages, we found there is compassion between similar socioeconomic classes, but many are not willing to help a homeless person in the same neighborhood.
In the corporate world, it's not uncommon to find that jerk CEO who is completely uncompassionate and screws over his company. Is that something that happens because they got in that position, and it taught them to less compassionate, or does it start in childhood? For this one, we are looking into what is called the deprivation mindset. This when someone experiences emotional deprivation in childhood. It can cause you to feel not important or lovable enough, and this can persist into adulthood. It can cause people to feel as if they never have enough of the things they need. This mindset kind of carries over the scarcity mindset. It is really just a human coping mechanism, and it affects cognitive tests as well.
A study about impoverished farmers in India found people performed better on cognitive tests at the end of the harvest season when they have resources and not in the scarcity mindset. However, at the beginning when they were running low on money, their IQ effectively dropped 13 points. But generally speaking, if you are lonely or deprived, it impedes you and messes with your coping mechanism. It makes you hoard, and it makes you more stressed and anxious. For some support, one of the top ways to combat the scarcity mindset is by practicing gratitude and not comparing yourself to others.
Final Thoughts
Pretty much every study or scientific source points towards our narrative-driven brain for why we don't have compassion for the masses. In fact, compassion drops off sharply as soon as the number of suffering victims increases from just one. Repeatedly having the same compassion circuit tapped in our head literally desensitizes it. In short, our brains might be built to go numb after a big number of tragedies because while a death in our tribe is tragic, the death within another tribe far away is significantly less so.
Political leaders throughout history have proven capable of compassion after the conflict has died down. Just like Grant, who was an extremely unlikely source of compassion if his critics can be believed. If you've ever wondered why greed can overwhelm a person's compassion, it might be worth remembering the scarcity mindset. Lacking things in childhood, especially fundamental things like love, compassion, or a sense of importance, can lead to an overwhelming impulse to hoard resources. The greedy CEO who drove tenured staff to quit so he can hire cheap contractors might seem like an unfeeling bastard, but there is a human mechanism and a sense of deprivation behind that greed. That doesn't mean we should forgive him, but understanding greed can go a long way in disarming it.
Lastly, if you want to overcome compassion fatigue while spreading your message, use narrative. Get someone hooked on a story that demonstrates a need. Use an individual as your example, an individual who stands for the needs of a group like Rosa Parks, Walter Gladstone, and Anna Frank. That's the key to penetrating the numb-haze that is compassion fatigue - tell a good story.
Grant Fun Facts - Bonus:
o Grant was supposed to be sitting next to Lincoln the day he was assassinated. He could have potentially stopped it from happening.
o After spending a decade in the Army in the Mexican-American War, he spent the next seven years as a farmer, a real estate agent, and a rent collector. Grant also sold firewood in the streets of St. Louis.
o He and his son started a financial business that went bankrupt very quickly.
o Grant was responsible in the 1860s for breaking up the Ku Klux Klan. He ran the clan out of business, and it didn’t come back until the 1910s.
o Grant could have charged Robert E Lee with treason and sent him to death after the Civil War, but he prevented that from happening through forgiveness.