The Dizziness of the Good Samaritan

What does it mean to have the best intentions in hall of mirrors

Kierkegaard describes the concept of human agency as "the dizziness of freedom", with the parable of, when you are standing at the top of a cliff looking down, the vertigo and nausea you experience is caused not by the fantasy "I might accidentally fall off and die", but rather that you are faced with the implicit undeniable knowledge, that you could CHOOSE to throw yourself off at any point, and what the cliff does is it faces you with your own freedom and capacity for human agency, in a way that an animal does not experience, because it does not have this capacity for existentialist choice.

I think we can use this to understand a common modern problem, which is "what are we going to do about the poor/stupid/homeless/insane/slightly less wealthy people" - when you see the lesser-thans of society on the street, or when you are bombarded with images in media and propaganda of crying children and so on. The reason these things work is because they, like the cliff, faces you with an undeniable fact of your own psychology: you COULD throw yourself off the cliff. You COULD help the teenager who is shoplifting, just to provoke a reaction and daring the world to do something about it. You could take him under your wing and adopt him, even as he fights back, and make yourself responsible for him. However:

Helping someone is not free. That's the big problem, the contradiction that the modern post-Christian worldview cannot account for and is causing people so much inner turmoil. Helping people costs you something, a pound of flesh, that you are not getting back. The idea that you can just uplift people and then we can both take part in the infinite resources of modernity is a fantasy, and even if it wasn't, then real charity would be impossible. Real charity is giving something without expecting anything in return. And real giving something is not, giving someone the scraps of your meal after you have eaten yourself full. To give is to lose something. It has a cost and you have to incur that cost. You have to go hungry.

A lot of people in the modern world lives in a very detached, primitive world, where food comes from the grocery store, and because they don’t understand the process and how difficult and complicated it is, the base presumption about the world is “wealth is already infinite”. We already have infinite resources, and the only reason there are lesser-thans in the first place, is because the ressources are not distributed correctly. This is then either ascribed to incompetence or malice, usually malice. The latter part is what we are digging into here: Why does the modern man ascribe inequality to human malice, and not the harsh brustal indifference of nature and the universe?

One fundamental problem in the modern, mainstream worldview that is causing so much of our culture, social relations and instritutions to buckle under its contradictions, is this: “Helping People” is not free. It actually costs you something.

What the normal person feels when he sees the starving migrant photo op is a cliff, and the cliff is saying "you have to suffer if you want to help this child", and modern man has no psychological or philosophical framework to understand those feelings. He knows in an implicit way that he is choosing his own comfort over the “child”, hypothetical or real, and because his higher mind lives in lala-candy-teletubby-land where we have infinite resources and "being nice doesn't cost you anything", he cannot make sense of his own immediate emotions of shame, and cannot contexualise them, and instead (often intentionally propagandized to channel it so) projects the shame feelings onto a Villain Other who is Depriving The Poor Just To Be Mean, because he does not know his own heart.

The lesson of the good Samaritan is not "all Samaritan are actually really cool, so why dont you quit it with the anti-samaritansim". The good Samaritan is good and worth emulating, because he does something without getting anything in return. He expends his wealth to help someone in his path, without getting a return on that investment. When the good samaritan sees the injured man, he willingly chooses to suffer an injury. And the injury is not a trick, its not a test, it’s not “Ah but then later he gets rewarded for helping him, so it was all really secretly englithened self-interest all along, and if you DONT do this, you are actually just STUPID because you arent enlightened enough to see how it is in your own self-interest”. None of that. It is simply acruing a loss. Period, no comma, not but, not “and then”. Full stop.

In our modern, enlightened era, we interpret the good samaritan as an enlightened rationalist, who realises that if he acts a certain way that will benefit society which he then in turn benefits from. We think the Samaritan is operating on 3-4 levels of abstraction to justify his action. When he sees the wounded man lying in the street he stops and pulls out a spreedsheet to calculate the utilitarian values of every variable, and then acts after making a rational deduction deciding his cause of action. Because, this is the fantasy that we like to imagine about ourselves, when we make actions in the world, because this is the fashion and the zeitgeist we were raised in: The prime value in all things is intelligence and calculation, and it is so important, that the question of free will becomes secondary. We would rather imagine ourselves as automatron robots who only hallucinate the experience of free will, than not identify with the notion of “intelligent”. When push comes to shove, people would rather think themselvese intelligent than free, and therefore, we expend an excessive amount of mental ressources justifying and worrying about our choices - retroactively. I believe this is the underlying cause for the collective obsession with detective fiction, who-dun-its, true crime, etc, in our popular entertainment. But what actually happens when you see the Wounded Man, is not a cold deduction. The detective fiction with the autistic super hero who can deduce the motives of the murderer, is a soothening fantasy we indulge in to cover up the gaps in our worldview: When you see the wounded man the first things you feel are Horror, Fear and Shame. Very unfashionable emotions! You are supposed to feel Cool And Detached and Ironic and Above It All all the time. The horror of life and death reminds us with gribbing immideacy, that we are flesh and blood, and not detached brains in jars.

Modernity tries to protect itself, like any nervous system does, and cover its tracks. People are re-discovering that charity has a cost, as they invent the term “emotional labor”, to justify their refusal. This is intuitively distasteful, and we say about the people who use these terms that it is a horrifyingly mercantile approach to human affairs. That is true, but at the same time, the “emotional labor” people are grabbling with the crux of the issue: Modern man cannot account for what we historically have called Charity, and he tries his best to account for it within the only framework he has - mecantalism. Numbers and graphs and calculations and deductions, and exchanges.

If you live in a world, where wealth is infinite and ressources are plentiful, then there is logically no reason for the wounded man to be wounded, the hungry child to go hungry. But to accept that you do not in fact live in such a world, would mean that YOU are already hungry and wounded. You are already a lesser-than. And this represents a kierkegaardian cliff, a confrontation with a binary, mutually exclusive choice. Either YOU (or some other villain) are guilty of withholding wealth from the Other, or, YOU ARE ALSO THE WOUNDED MAN (The world is dangerous and nature is cruel and indifferent). And the mind always prefers stability over anything else, and modern man is very detached from nature, so most people choose a).

The good samaritan is the man who, when faced with the wounded man, willingly chooses to be wounded. On a prime, animal, psychological level. The reason this parable is in the bible, is because it mirrors the entire idea behind Christ and the crusifiction. God becomes embodied, and willingly chooses to be wounded, out of charity. God does not do this out of enlightened self-interest, because there is nothing we could offer to God. There is no benefit to God, God has no necessity, no need to do it. He purely gives of himself, for no reason. That is charity, and that is the lesson of charity, that we are encouraged to follow over and over in the new testament. We cannot justify ourselves to God, there is never anything we could ever do that will have made his sacrifice “worth it”, in an utilitarian enlightened self-interest calculus way. This is very hard to understand, because the mind, when faced with this premise, has been trained your whole life to look for reasons and explenations: There must be a cause and a reason. And that is why people are very lonely, and why they struggle to love. Real love, charity, is madness. To endure being wounded, to pay a price, for another, for no reason.

Our modern “post-christian” western world has been struggling for 250 years to replace the christian ethics with a more reputable, respectful, scientific system, without all the embarrasing stone age stories and metaphysics, and we are not an inch closer than 250 years ago.

To love is to let yourself be wounded. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. This is the lesson of christianity, of Christ, and of the Good Samaritan.

When the modern, comfortable, affluent middle class individual sees criminal youth in the streets, or crying migrants on the tv or on his phone, the internal process in his mind is a confrontation with a contradiction in himself: He likes to imagine himself, “loving” and “caring” - “being nice doesnt cost you anything”. But the experience confronts him with the undeniable fact of his own existential agency, like the cliff and the jump: As when Jesus tells the “wealthy young man” to “sell all you have and follow me”. This is not a literal state policy that is being prescribed, but something more private: The desired state of harmonious being can only be achieved if you pay the price of entry. To be engaged in the world, to feel connected, you have to give something. You have to actually lose something. Helping someone is not free, you have to actually help them.

You don’t solve the downtrodden low-socio-economic dysfunctional class of 100.000 people with 30 people and a 100 million dollar budget and a nice philosophy. The only way you can help those people is if 100.000 people, individually get personally invested and willingly give up a pound of flesh to help one person. By interacting with them, and raising them, and fighting them, and relating to them on a grim, vulgar, petty human level. You cannot “save the world”, ever, no matter what. You cannot even, no matter how smart you are, create a philosophy or system that would “theoretically” save the world, if “everyone else just followed it”. The ONLY thing you can do, EVER, is helping one person, who is in front of you right now. And it will cost you half of everything you have. And you have no guarantee that anyone else will do the same. In fact most wont. It’s a dizzying, nausiating feeling. Like standing on top of a cliff and looking down.