In Praise Of Each
As part of living by the Humanity Project’s empirical ideas of shared value, I’ve understood some other things more clearly than ever.
First, that our value as human beings is intrinsic — that it simply makes more sense to believe each human being has an unconditional and equal value, not based on talents, skills, looks, money or anything else. I’ve always believed that but, as I said, shared value’s ideas have helped me see it in sharper detail.
Second, I have come to believe that this intrinsic value results not only from the extraordinary human traits we all share, such things as imagination, self-awareness, the ability to delay reward while working toward goals, etc. This value also is based on our individuality itself. We each bring to the world a unique set of traits, from our DNA makeup to our family backgrounds, from the circumstances of our upbringing to the experiences we have along the way. I find this a wonderful thought. It means that our diversity as members of our species is itself a major strength, that our individual uniqueness should be respected and celebrated. The topic is far too large to explore fully in a blog, of course. (Yes, I know — it’s already a long blog! 
) But for now, I wanted to simply share the basic thought: that we’re each inherently valuable in significant part precisely because we’re each special in some unique ways. Now, if we can only convince the world’s political and social leaders of this, eh?
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