Introduction to What We Are Doing

Last update: 2024-06-21

We are Partners for a Global Management of Suffering. This webbook, Our Action Plan About Suffering, deals with what we do.

On November 25, 2023, we started our association to bring us together and carry out our work. We also started our webbook as a continually evolving document to identify and coordinate what we do together.

Our activity focuses on the systematic prevention of excessive suffering in the world. More technically speaking, we are developing a new specialized field that seeks to control the phenomenon of suffering in order to optimally minimize the occurrences of consciousness that we consider “too” unpleasant.

In the expression “Partners for a Global Management of Suffering” :

• We use “a” because this management is ours, and it focuses primarily on excessive suffering, rather than being “the” universal management, and one that would deal with all suffering to an equal extent.
• We use “global” because what we have in mind is the whole world and a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon of suffering.
• We use “management” rather than reduction, prevention, or abolition because we seek to control suffering in order to optimally minimize its excessively unpleasant occurrences, and this may involve admitting some of those occurrences in certain cases.
• We use “suffering” to refer to a concrete physical phenomenon of a psychological nature characterized as an unpleasant occurrence of consciousness.

We regard our field of work as a specialty, whose object of interest is the phenomenon of suffering itself and not what comes under the purview of other fields of expertise such as healthcare, economics, ethics, law, etc. Arguably, work concerning suffering in any of these other fields has another primary object of concern, such as health (illness), wealth (poverty), the good (the bad), the right (crime), etc. We can use what these fields do to carry out our management, and vice-versa (other fields can use what we do), but let us all be careful not to confuse the different specialties, which are always concerned first and foremost with their own specific object.

Our book attempts to summarize a wide variety of information from a wide range of sources:

Part 1: Contributions from a Discipline Specialized in the Study of Suffering deals with what we retain, in order to develop our global management, from a new discipline devoted to understanding and controlling the phenomenon of suffering.

Part 2: Contributions from Various Disciplinary Fields examines the activities in several knowledge areas that provide means of developing the kind of management of suffering we envision.

Part 3: Contributions from Suffering-Focused Initiatives looks at what we adopt as a part of our global management from some contemporary endeavors dealing with suffering as a specialty.

Overall, the role of this book is to set out in detail the measures that we are putting into practice to systematically prevent excessive suffering. The first thing we are doing is operating Partners for a Global Management of Suffering. The second is keeping Our Action Plan About Suffering up to date. Everything else we do is a continuation of these two actions. See, for example, Conclusion: What We Are Doing, in Brief.

If you and/or your organization would like to take part in our enterprise, let us see together in what capacity you could be involved and listed as a partner.

For more information, write to admin@aboutsuffering.org or see our Google document Administration Notebook.