Humility is Greater Than Hope
I live in a part of the world that has a mad, mad, mad fixation on success, especially unsustainable success but generally a preoccupation with being successful. My part of the world consumes 25% of global resources and in political moments it talks about hope. If people don't have hope consuming that much resource then what of the parts of the world whose nations are plundered to enable that consumption?
There are pockets of dangerous areas to live in my part of the world, but they don't come close to the atrocity filled landscape of a place like Congo.
We already know that empathy is something we sugar-coat as our society's support of emotional intelligence. Peter Salovey, Ph.D and John Mayer, Ph.D came up with the term emotional intelligence way back in 1990. Five years later Daniel Goldman became famous with his best selling book of the same name and Goldman got associated with EQ. How many people in Congo did that save then, and how many has is saved today. It is not that my part of the world is not empathetic enough, my part of the world is not humble enough. That was clear enough to see in the famous picture of the starving child and the vulture.
Kevin Carter the South African photographer who took this picture was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this shot. Kevin Carter also committed suicide at the age of 33, possibly through being traumatized by the acclaim he received for this haunting shot. Where empathy led to an award winning photograph, humility arose consciousness at least maybe in the heart of the photographer about what attracts people on media and what really humbles people into becoming human beings. It is not a guarantee that we are human beings, especially if we think of ourselves primarily as a brand. This the vomit I feel for a society driven by its fixations on success and the temerity to note that everyone has a "personal brand" - if that is so, pray tell me what the personal brand of this dying little girl is - a brand good enough to win a Pulitzer Prize? Humility must then be greater than hope, so long as it does not drag our lives into humiliation or a sudden consciousness of action that then may have haunted a Kevin Carter, enough to not bother about this "personal brand" and more about not being able to live with himself for being that brand. Humility should not lead us to our death, it should lead us to our humanity. Decades later we still respond to pictures like the one above. Those of us who live in my part of the world continue to write about happiness and hope as if these are huge missing holes in what Phil Collins calls "Another Day in Paradise" - and in comparison to Congo it really is.
Even if my own humility has been tested, it can never reach the depths and lows of those parts of the world that are exploited and serve only to provide us product. Cheaper product so we can have a happier and more hope filled life courtesy of a behemoth retailer. Great brands should be great product, so there is nothing wrong with the brand promise of a product, what is wrong is how lacking we may be in humility so that we don't take into account the backstory of where that product may have come and who may have been used to bring us affordable consumerism.
Today the people who live in the area of India and China want what my part of the world wanted and it wants it more because there 4x the number of people who want that, and they don't need the West to give them a lecture about finding humility. China in particular is doing its utmost to lock up key resources so that it can continue and accelerate what was once the providence of the West.
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Comments
CityVP Manjit
6 years ago #6
Thank you Charlene. The value is this humility creates the skin of our own resilience.
CityVP Manjit
6 years ago #5
You are most welcome Melissa, and thank you for being the essence of what is most human about being a human being.
CityVP Manjit
6 years ago #4
Thank you Harvey.
CityVP Manjit
6 years ago #3
That is why humility is really key, every single day we as social beings we engage in tremendous amounts of idol worship. We share the esteemed in our lives but not the humbled. I am sure we can assemble a social network of homeless people but what would drive us to have a "LinkedOut" network. Even the idea of homeless people with smartphones feels odd to us and makes us think strange things https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/upshot/fighting-homelessness-one-smartphone-at-a-time.html Notice what the New York Times article reported Bill Gates saying also. We have no trouble with greatness but do with ordinary.
CityVP Manjit
6 years ago #2
This is what I said to the kids in our college that the craziest thing about "success' is that we ourselves define it. Once we define it then we live in the prison of our own expectations. Most billionaires surely do not prescribe to his definition of success because most of them don't want any of us to know who they are. Not only are they are not known to us but their world is not one any of us could relate with, and why would billionaires worry about success when it is as ubiquitous as salt water is in a ocean. In comparison we are all plumbing and very few of us even want to be successful plumbers, even though our social taps drip with wannabee notions of success. Compared to a billionaire I am an abject failure and I am really good at defining failure :-)
CityVP Manjit
6 years ago #1