compassion and intelligence by: Maslow
From the last journal entry of Psychologist Abraham Maslow, May 7, 1970:
Somebody asked me the question... How did a timid youngster get transformed into a (seemingly) 'courageous' leader and spokesman? How come I was willing to talk up, to take unpopular positions, while most others didn't? My immediate tendency was to say: "Intelligence - just realistic seeing of the facts," but I held that answer back because - alone - it's wrong. "Good will, compassion and intelligence," I finally answered. I think I added that I'd simply learned a lot from my self-actualized subjects and from their way of life and from their metamotivations, which have now become mine. So I respond emotionally to the injustice, the meanness, the lies, the untruths, the hatred and the violence, the simplistic answers... So I feel cheap and guilty and unmanly when I don't talk up. So then in a sense, I have to.
What the kids and the Intellectuals - and everyone else too - need is an ethos, a scientific value system and a way of life and humanistic politics, with the theory, the facts, etc., all set forth soberly... So again I must say to myself: to work!
(Lowry, 1979, Vol II, pg 1309)
Somebody asked me the question... How did a timid youngster get transformed into a (seemingly) 'courageous' leader and spokesman? How come I was willing to talk up, to take unpopular positions, while most others didn't? My immediate tendency was to say: "Intelligence - just realistic seeing of the facts," but I held that answer back because - alone - it's wrong. "Good will, compassion and intelligence," I finally answered. I think I added that I'd simply learned a lot from my self-actualized subjects and from their way of life and from their metamotivations, which have now become mine. So I respond emotionally to the injustice, the meanness, the lies, the untruths, the hatred and the violence, the simplistic answers... So I feel cheap and guilty and unmanly when I don't talk up. So then in a sense, I have to.
What the kids and the Intellectuals - and everyone else too - need is an ethos, a scientific value system and a way of life and humanistic politics, with the theory, the facts, etc., all set forth soberly... So again I must say to myself: to work!
(Lowry, 1979, Vol II, pg 1309)