Imagining rewarding the empathetic and the compassionate...

 

"Nobody foresaw the world shortage of respect"¹, so compassion and empathy are perhaps our best responses to the growing realisation that even as we watch each other post and connect and feed and comment and tweet, what goes on in other people's heads is becoming ever more puzzling.

So let's find and honour and reward meaning-makers and empathisers.  Welcome as they are, charters of compassion are just the start - perhaps we need open-source universities of the intimate, "where all generations can exchange experience, culture and hope".²

^{1. Theodore Zeldin, Intimate History of Humanity, p28; 2. Intimate History of Humanity, p31}