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Even the best intentions can produce suffering. Even when our desires and beliefs are perfectly aligned with principles of care, consideration, and cooperation, we can suffer because of them.

Intentions are future-oriented entities. They are formed by judgments we make about how we want our future to be. When we act primarily on our intentions, we also become future-oriented. Our every moment is then consumed by thoughts and feelings about how our future will be and how it might differ from the ideal constructed by our intentions. This happens because we easily become attached to our intentions.

When we are attached, we identify with our desires, aversions, and beliefs, and when we identify, it feels necessary to seek out the things we desire, to avoid the things we hate and fear, and to confirm our beliefs. To act instead from compassion does not require us to change our intentions, but only to allow ourselves adequate distance from them. Our intentions can then exist freely as the future-oriented entities they are, while we ourselves exist wholly in the present, sensitive and responsive to what is most needed and necessary right now.

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We want to get what we want because we think it will make us feel better. Our rational goal is happiness, which we expect to achieve through the satisfaction of our desires. To get there, we will do whatever we have to do.

Recognizing this, those with power construct systems that motivate us to do what they want in order to get what we want. The fairness (or lack thereof) of these systems is irrelevant — if following their incentives is the only way to satisfy our desires then we will follow them. It is only logical for us to do so if we want to be happy.

But lasting happiness is always just out of sight — there is always one more desire to fulfill before we get there. We soon come to believe that because of the systems imposed on us, the only way to be permanently happy is to amass resources, just like those with power over us. The result is that we build a culture of withholding, of always holding back, out of the relentless worry that we won't have enough to get what we want.

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