The Humanity Project

Isn’t it amazing, though? People die all around our world every day by the thousands and few of us stop to think — or care. Yet 33 Chilean miners have reminded us all that we really do care. We care about other people and we feel connected to other people. We learned enough about these men to empathize with their plight, to imagine ourselves trapped half a mile underground for months. And because of this, we cared about whether they got out safely or not. All of us feel deeply grateful that they did make it out of that awful pit. We admire their courage and discipline and what appears to be their genuine concern for each other. We respect the courage of the rescuers who risked their lives, including Manuel Gonzalez who went down first to help save the miners. We are all inspired. But here at the Humanity Project, we also see this event as more evidence that human beings are not self-absorbed and selfish by nature. A self-centered existence is something we learn over time in response to the frustrations and disappointments and pain we experience out in the world. The Humanity Project believes that people can unlearn this self-centered way of living and tap into our deeper feelings of connection with each other. That’s what our empirically based ideas about “shared value” are about. We believe that doing this isn’t just a “nice” way to live. It helps liberate us and focus our daily lives on what’s really important: developing our best qualities and sharing them in ways that help other people.

Tags: Chilean miners, human values, Humanity Project, Manueal Gonzalez, positive psychology, shared value, teaching human values, The Humanity Project

This entry was posted by Bob Knotts on Thursday, October 14th, 2010 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Sharing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.