What may be motivating apathy or action

Here's a small excerpt from this week's Speaking of Faith. I always recommend listening to the Uncut version.
Krista Tippett interviews Ingrid Jordt about her experiences in Burma.

Ms. Jordt: And so I'm feeling that we need to find new strategies. And the ways that the Burmese have undertaken the everyday strategies to everyday life and everyday suffering, I think draw on a number of — a cultivation of the number of key mental states. And one of them is compassion. And compassion is known in Buddhism as one of the four sublime states of mature emotion. And with compassion, a person feels inclined to show special kindness to those who suffer. Compassion permits us to perceive pain and torment and suffering in another living being.

But the thing that's interesting, and this is something that my Burmese monk teacher said to me, is that with a mental state, any mental state that's wholesome, but with a mental state such as compassion, there's always a near enemy to compassion. And the near enemy of compassion is sorrow. What's interesting about sorrow is that you're unable to do anything on behalf of another person's suffering. And compassion, on the other hand, allows you to feel that there is something that can be done. And so I feel that we need to cultivate here in the West — if we talk about apathy — our own mental states; if we feel outrage, that we realize that that response will create anger and only more hatred and violence.

Ms. Tippett: So you're saying we recognize our outrage also as akin to another possible reaction.

Ms. Jordt: What I'm saying, if our response to the crisis in Burma today as outrage, then we're responding with anger. And if we feel disappointment and hopelessness, then the response is sorrow and pity and apathy again. But if we have compassion and if we choose to cultivate mental states of truly the understanding of what it means that another being is suffering the way that they are in Burma, then I think it we'll undertake a kind of renewed activism toward making the case of Burma something that just doesn't disappear off the newswaves because we have also become apathetic.