There has been a lot of great discussion regarding the explicit messages conveyed by Ram Dass. However, one thing that I found interesting in How Can I Help? was the implicit arguments made by Ram Dass. On an abstract level, it is telling that Ram Dass chose to respond to suffering on an individual level instead of in a broad sense. Many political and philosophical books have been written about the response to suffering on a macro level, proposing solutions to the suffering resulting from the alienation of labor, political disenfranchisement, and material deprivation. While this literature is extensive, Dass makes the decision to focus on different solutions to suffering other than structural change.

Marx searched for structural changes to alleviate suffering

Dass acknowledges the expectation for the “government to relieve suffering” (10). At the same time, Dass also finds that such an expectation is too narrow of a scope to find solutions to the problem of suffering. Dass notes that while governments implement policies that cause suffering, any individual politician would “probably do everything he could, faced with one starving child” (10). Dass is effectually deconstructing the State as an institution comprised of individuals with their own agency to relieve minute instances of suffering. Dass’s reconfiguration of the question of agency to relieve suffering enables each person to alter suffering in their own way.

Charity and service can result from deeper connections with suffering

Some of the Dass passages also relate to the concept of compassion fatigue that many of us discussed in a previous Facebook discussion. We mentioned previously that compassion fatigue causes individuals to respond less and less to the proliferation of images of people suffering. Dass notes that being confronted with suffering sometimes triggers off “an almost morbid fascination. We continually feed ourselves, through newspapers, soap operas, tragedies, and gossip with images of suffering” (55). However, Dass actually offers a solution to the problem of compassion fatigue. He believes that instead we can confront our own relationship to suffering which ultimately frames the way that we approach the suffering of others. By having a different perception of suffering, we can “look anew at how each situation can teach us, how it can help us evolve in our ability to confront and help alleviate suffering” (72). This was one thing that I really appreciated about the Dass book. It genuinely attempted to find solutions to problems that it’s difficult to even conceive of solutions to respond with.