“The kindest person in the room is often the smartest”
Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker advised Northwestern University graduates this month to pursue kindness. Our more primitive impulses demand we be suspicious of the unfamiliar, including people unlike ourselves. It’s an evolutionary survival instinct.
To be kind, Pritzker says, “we have to shut down that animal insinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges.”
The alternative approach taken by some of our neighbors is to embrace “weaponized cruelty” (as in Adam Serwer’s famous coinage).
“I’m here to tell you,” Pritzker continues, “that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty they have failed the first test of an advanced society.”
Moreover (and this is not Pritzker), what paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey theorized is that compassion carries a more an advanced survival advantage that turned primitive Man into modern Man:
Bipedalism carried with it an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.
As I wrote, pre-Trump, “In fact, it would seem that a movement that sneers at being your brother’s keeper in organizing human society is hardly an accomplishment, cultural, political, or evolutionary.”
Kindness, Pritzker adds, is a mark of creativity and problem-solving ability. He punctuates that observation with another.
“Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true, the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”
“They’re at DEFCON 1”
What is it like to have to scan every room for people for whom empathy and compassion are highly selective, people who may consider you prey? George Hahn can tell you.