CHAPTER 13

To Soar Above, Build a Web of Compassion and Kindness

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

—Eric Hoffer

No isolation is so great as lack of compassion for others and no emptiness so desolate as lack of compassion for self. You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

—Aesop

There was a man in a plane going down who wrote a five-word note for his family. He put it in a mint tin so it wouldn’t burn up in the crash.

The charred note read, “Be nice to each other.”

Another man, trapped in a collapsed coal mine, wrote to his family as the oxygen left the small cavity where he lay: “It wasn’t so bad, I just went to sleep.”

Think of the many phone messages that came out of the burning towers on 9/11. No one spoke of resentment or contempt or hatred or revenge, only compassion and kindness.

The borders of our lives, if they are to make sense, must be compassion and kindness.

Compassion and Survival

The survival of human beings on this planet owes more to our sense of compassion than our propensity for aggression. Early humans had to prevail against more powerful and plentiful predators, against whom our intelligence alone would have had met with little success. Just look at what we were up against. Our chief competitors, big cats and wolves, cranked out a couple of litters a year, while our human ancestors had one offspring at a time, with very high rates of miscarriage and infant mortality. In addition to being outnumbered, the physical limitations of early humans put them at a severe disadvantage in the survival sweepstakes. They lacked claws, sharp teeth, speed, agility, and strength. They could not see, smell, hear, jump, or climb trees as well as more powerful predators. They couldn’t see at all in the dark, while big cats were nocturnal hunters. In this precarious environment, the ability to form tightly knit social units to hunt and fight collectively was crucial for survival. One person against a saber-toothed tiger had no chance, but five fighting together would prevail.

Two things must be present in a psychological system that consistently overrides the choice for individual survival. There has to be a strong motivation to get people to risk their lives for others in the first place and a powerful reinforcement to keep them doing it once they experience how dangerous it is.

The powerful motivation that got early humans to risk their lives for others in the tribe was probably a form of psychological merging. It had to seem to the rescuers like their own lives were at stake, as if their own existence would end if they did not help endangered brothers and sisters. Interviews with modern heroes give a clue as to how this motivation to put one’s own life at risk might have been experienced. Modern heroes—police officers, firefighters, military personnel—often say that they could not conceive of failing to rescue. It seemed to them like a force greater than their fear made them do it. I heard a firsthand account of this many years ago when I interviewed a policeman in his hospital room. He was in traction as a result of grabbing a man who was trying to jump off a bridge. He held the man with one arm while leaning over the balustrade, his head almost parallel with the top of the ice-cold railing. Help didn’t come for nearly twenty minutes. I asked whether in all that time he considered letting go of this man who, after all, was trying to commit suicide. His reply: “It felt like if I let go, we’d both die.”

For our early ancestors, the force of psychological merging under intense stress had to overcome threats to their individual lives. Those tribal members whose genes had a compassionate and cooperative tendency passed on those genes, while those who did not, perished. In those perilous times of early human history, rescuing fellows in danger could not be just a one-shot deal, for there was always another saber-toothed tiger around the bend. There had to be rich internal and social rewards—reinforcement both within and without—to keep people risking their lives for one another. These bountiful rewards were and are in the Adult brain—an enhanced sense of self and a general feeling of self-value for compassionate and cooperative behavior. The person who defended a child against attack by a predator probably felt great about himself afterward. And that high self-estimation was sure to gain social reinforcement, as fellow tribespeople admired his courage or regarded her as a hero. Yet positive reward wasn’t always enough to ensure survival of the species. There had to be harsh punishments for failing at compassion. A person who cowered behind a rock while a child succumbed to a predator would suffer severe guilt and shame and probably abandonment anxiety. If the tribe found out about it, the coward would face derision, if not banishment to a certain death by starvation or predator.

So the reward for compassionate behavior was as good as it could get: pride, self-value, well-being, and social admiration. And the punishment for failure of compassion was as bad as it could get: guilt, shame, self-loathing, social derision, and fear of abandonment. These potent rewards and punishments for group loyalty drive human interactions in everything from primitive tribal affiliation to complex community and national identities. Think of the pride of being “American” or “Christian” or “Jewish” or “Muslim,” compared to the guilt and shame of being disloyal to one’s affiliations. Identification with a group has traditionally provided us with a sense of safety, security, emotional connection, and value. Disloyalty to groups has brought rejection, banishment, and death.

The motivation to help fellow tribesmen began as a life-or-death instinct in early humans. It evolved into the life force that now drives us to create connections of value. The human instinct to be compassionate is what we think of as our humanity; we judge people to be lovable if they are compassionate and to be inhumane if they are not. More important, we judge ourselves according to our level of compassion, no matter how much we may delude ourselves with inflated egos or try to blame, deny, and avoid our way out of it. Consistent failure to be compassionate eventually yields self-loathing.

Justifying Failure of Compassion

The strongest argument for the instinct to be compassionate is the fact that we have to justify failing at it. Thus we have concepts like the “worthy poor”—a classification supposedly linked to those physically or mentally unable to help themselves. (By implication, the rest of the poor are “unworthy.”) This kind of rationalization gives us a way to live with ourselves while failing to act on our natural instincts for compassionate behavior. How many times have you heard someone say, “Why should I care about them?” or “What about me?” They’re arguing with themselves, with their own instinct to care and to help.

Soar Above the Threat of Compassion

People know intuitively that successful relationships require a certain amount of compassion. Yet some people become so invested in justifying their resentment and toddler coping mechanisms that they begin to view compassion as the cause of their hurt. They fear (and ultimately shrink from) the better angels of their nature.

Much of the dread that blocks the most healing and bonding of human emotions comes from confusing it with lesser experience, specifically:

Thank God that we can shine the light of the Adult brain on these unfortunate and unnecessary impediments to soaring above.

Compassion vs. Pity

Compassion implies equality: “I sympathize with your hurt. Despite our differences in luck or circumstance, we’re (humanely) equal.” Pity implies inequality: “I feel sorry for you because you’re incompetent, naive, insensitive, crazy, abusive, or defective in some way.” Compassion is caring about the well-being of another. Pity is feeling bad at the sight of another’s suffering. This particular feeling of inadequacy quickly turns to contempt, as we blame the dysphoric feeling on the person stimulating it. Bertolt Brecht mused that the first time we see a beggar on the street, we’ll pity him. The second time, we’ll call a policeman to have him removed.

Adults in the Toddler brain often confuse autonomy with acting morally or intellectually superior, only to be surprised by the negative reactions to what they think is compassionate behavior. Their presumption of inequality—“I feel sorry for you because you’re incompetent, crazy, abusive, or personality disordered”—will make any sympathetic behavior come off as pity. To a large extent, pity is the opposite side of the coin from contempt. That’s why we hate to feel pitied but long for compassion. You cannot be genuinely compassionate if you believe you’re superior in any way. When heartfelt compassionate acts garner a negative response, you can bet that the behavior, however sincere, was construed as pity. In the Toddler brain, compassion often feels like pity, and pity often passes for compassion. In the Adult brain, compassion is transcendent, freeing us from the prison of self-obsession. We soar above by caring more, not by pretending to be superior.

Compassion vs. Agreement

Compassion requires sympathy with the pain or discomfort of another, regardless of agreement about beliefs or ideas. You can disagree with ideas and behavior and still sympathize with the pain or hardship that may result from the ideas or behavior. Toddlers can’t do this because their sense of autonomy is too insecure to tolerate disagreement. Adults in the Toddler brain can’t do it because disagreement, especially from loved ones, strikes at both sides of the Grand Human Contradiction. In their autonomy struggle, they feel less in control of their own thoughts and feelings when others don’t think they’re “right.” On the connection side, disagreement feels like rejection; when “inflicted” by loved ones, it feels like betrayal.

In the Adult brain I can disagree totally with someone’s interpretation of my behavior or the intentions behind it and still feel compassion for the hardship they suffer because of their misinterpretation. As an added bonus, showing care for the hardship will alter the misperception, while a defensive reaction to it will make it stronger. For example, a woman I nearly brushed—but did not touch—at a crowded concert called after me, “You’re very rude!” I recognized that she felt devalued by what she thought was a deliberate attempt to push her aside.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you okay? I was pushed by the crowd behind me and I must have leaned into you. I’m so sorry.”

She appreciated my care, which convinced her that, if it was I who pushed her, it was entirely accidental. Now, had I said, “I didn’t push you. There’s a big crowd here. Everybody’s bumping and pushing,” she would have been convinced that I pushed her on purpose. But regardless of her interpretation, I felt better about myself experiencing compassion than I would have felt getting caught up in Toddler brain reactivity.

Compassion vs. Taking Advantage

In the Toddler brain, compassion can feel like you’re being tricked, as if someone was hurt or distressed just to take advantage of you. Feeling taken advantage of is loathsome for most people, but that can’t happen when you do what you believe in your heart is right. When you act according to your deepest values, you cannot be exploited, even if others violate their deeper values by trying to exploit you.

Compassion vs. Excusing Bad or Irresponsible Behavior

Compassion doesn’t condone or excuse bad behavior, because it’s not about behavior at all. Rather, compassion focuses on the pain, hardship, and human frailty that make people behave badly, while recognizing that the continuation of bad or irresponsible behavior will hurt them more. For example, it’s not compassionate to give an alcoholic a drink. The worst thing you can do for an abusive person is excuse the abuse, which contributes to the abuser’s self-loathing (bubbling beneath the inflated ego) caused by the continual violation of his or her deepest values. Neither is it compassionate to allow children to behave irresponsibly, lest they painfully learn later in life how cruel the world can be to the irresponsible.

Compassion vs. Trust

We never get hurt by too much compassion, but we’re hurt all the time by unwise trust. Compassion makes you less likely to trust unwisely. With compassion you see the depth of other people’s vulnerability and can more intelligently assess his or her defenses against it, which are usually resentment, anger, or some kind of abuse. Compassion must be unconditional in love relationships, but trust has to be earned, especially once it’s betrayed. Compassion gives a couple room to earn trust by disabling the automatic defense system that takes over resentful relationships.

The Healing Emotion

If it is genuine, no emotional experience can heal like compassion. To deeply understand the hurt of another is to heal your own.

No psychological wound can heal without compassion for self and for at least one other person. Research firmly supports the role of compassion as a predictor of success in psychotherapy. Therapists never heal clients; they model compassion for them to emulate. When the client can experience compassion for self and others, psychological healing occurs.

Apart from therapy, studies show that the support of friends and loved ones is crucial in coping with life’s harsher stressors, including sickness and death. Compassionate physicians enjoy a 30 percent better cure rate than those who may be more skilled but less caring. Controlling for the severity of the illness, people in intensive care units with no visitors suffer a lower recovery rate than those who have frequent visitors. Research aside, we have always known the role of compassion in physical healing. What is the first thing you do when a friend or loved one is ill? Call or visit them, ask if you can help, or send a get-well card, flowers, fruit, or candy. Nearly every hospital in the world has a gift or flower shop. Compassion proves to the sick that they are worthy of healing.

Droughts and Floods of Compassion

A traumatic event occurring on a national scale triggers floods of compassion from all over the country. All you see on TV after an earthquake or a school shooting is people reaching out, hugging, caring, and trying to help. Following the horror of 9/11, volunteer work and contributions to charities increased sharply all over the country, while violent crime, aggressive driving, and family abuse declined just as sharply. For a while, we were more important to one another. On smaller scales, you see the same impulse to reach out to one another at funerals. After a terrible fight with your spouse or child, you very much want to kiss and make up. You want to heal the rift, reinstate connection, and make things right. This desire lurks beneath most of the resentment and contempt between partners. It’s what keeps them together in the face of continuing pain, even when they don’t know how to reconnect. The focal point of all my workshops with highly distressed couples is to get them back in touch with their deep, though heavily defended, desire to be compassionate and kind to each other, which is the only way to dissipate chronic resentment and contempt in close relationships.

A flood of compassion after suffering derives from the survival importance of emotional connection. Under threat we pull together and care more about one another. But just like floods in nature, floods of compassion are unsustainable. They dry up with amazing rapidity. You may have received flowers after a fight with your husband, but that wave of goodwill almost immediately receded into a vast sea of routine. Within days of a death in the family, some of its members are likely to stop comforting one another and start bickering over property or mementoes. Just seven months after 9/11, violent crime, aggressive driving, and family violence had exceeded the levels of September 10, 2001.

Droughts in nature eventually cause floods by destroying the topsoil and vegetation that would otherwise absorb rain. So do droughts of compassion create many of the traumas that bring about floods of pain and distress. Lack of compassion on the part of anyone in the home practically guarantees emotional, if not physical, aggression, which will bring about yet another short-lived flood of remorse and caring. (In some cases the drought/flood dynamic turns into a cycle of violence.) None of the known mass killers gave or received sufficient compassion before they committed their crimes. They felt like outcasts and misfits, which was part of their motivation to exact their awful retribution.

Kindness

On the other side of the compassion coin we find kindness. Where compassion is sympathy for—and motivation to relieve—suffering and hardship, kindness is concern for the well-being of others, with a motivation to help them achieve it. Put another way, compassion is about suffering; kindness is about happiness. Important relationships cannot survive without compassion, and they cannot thrive without kindness.

Though it has enormous positive effects on those who give it, compassion, activated by apparent suffering or hardship, has a relatively minor influence on routine interaction with the Web of Emotion, where suffering and hardship are not usually apparent. Kindness is more amenable to the dynamics of the Web of Emotion. Thoughts of happiness and well-being for everyone you encounter will not only spread kindness along the Web of Emotion, it will make you soar above Toddler brain reactivity and self-obsession.

A Steady Trickle of Kindness

When Jan’s kid sister died of a drug overdose at age twenty-five, Jan’s husband, Roy, stepped up to the plate. “He was a prince,” Jan said, her eyes welling as she described that sad time of her life. Roy handled all the arrangements, gave her all the emotional support she could hope for, and was there for her family in every way possible. He got her through the crisis, and she was eternally grateful. But it was neither his flood of compassion nor her gratitude that made their relationship stronger for the rest of their lives.

Although she certainly appreciated the wave of support her husband had provided after the traumatic death of her young sister, what Jan found more endearing was the fact that, some fifteen years later, Roy continued to write her a daily note: “Take care, I love you.” He never left the house or came into it without hugging her. Every day, he either brought her a single flower or lit a candle for her. As wonderful as his wave of compassion during the crisis period of her loss was, the small, continuing acts of kindness had more lasting effects on her emotional well-being . . . and on his. He told me that he could no longer be happy without doing these small acts of kindness. Jan was convinced that her periods of “feeling down” were much fewer and farther between because of Roy’s small acts of kindness.

Great waves of compassion motivate beneficial behavior but do not sustain it. It’s small acts of kindness that provide a maintenance level of well-being. We have to feel kindness or compassion at least a few minutes a day, preferably spread out over the course of the day, for optimal functioning. But I can hear many readers asking themselves, How can I live my life that way? Won’t people take advantage of me? Trust me, you’ll prefer living your life that way once you get into the habit, and, no, most people won’t take advantage of you. But even if some do, it won’t matter, because you’ll act out of conviction that you’re doing the right thing. In other words, you’ll still soar above.

The reason you’re not likely to get a negative response to genuine compassion and kindness is what I call the “compassion/kindness paradox.” There’s a weird paradox about kindness and compassion. If available whenever needed, they’re rarely needed. Research shows that when people feel secure in the knowledge that compassion and support will be there when they need it, they are far more independent. Worry that it won’t be available if needed creates deprivation motivation, which makes them want all they can get while they can get it, because it may never again be available. Applying preventive kindness in small doses, rather than unsustainable floods of compassion after something bad happens, will actually prevent bad things from happening in your relationships.

Compassion and Kindness Make Us Happier, Smarter, and More Attractive

Roy was onto something when he said that he couldn’t be happy without doing his small acts of kindness. Brain imaging studies show that pleasure centers in the brain are as equally active when we observe someone giving money to charity as when someone gives us money. In the Adult brain, giving to others increases well-being more than buying yourself something.

Compassion and kindness make us smarter by breaking the self-obsession of the Toddler brain that keeps out vast amounts of information. Compassion and kindness increase our knowledge about—and deepen our understanding of—the people with whom we share this planet. And that in turn makes us more attractive. According to research, people rate kindness as one of their most desired qualities in a potential romantic partner.

True Compassion and Kindness Support Autonomy

Empowerment means helping people gain the confidence to solve their problems. It does not mean solving problems for them. Whenever we do something for another person or a community or another nation, compassion and kindness require that it contribute to their sense of competence, dignity, and long-term autonomy. Kindness and compassion are not mere indulgence in joy or sympathy. They carry a responsibility to promote, at least in a small way, the best interests of others. Because autonomy is so important to the emotional well-being of human beings, compassionate and kind behavior must support the increasing self-sufficiency of the recipient. They function best as a jump start of another’s self-compassion, self-nurturing, self-healing, competence, growth, creativity, and compassion for others. The empowering gift of self-sufficiency always underlies compassionate and kind behavior.

A young child wakes up screaming about monsters coming out of the wall. His nurturing parents run to give him comfort. “Mommy and Daddy are here. It’s okay. It was just a bad dream. We’ll protect you.” They remain a comforting presence until the child falls back to sleep.

However nice this seems, it’s not enough. Having performed this initial comforting gesture, compassionate and kind parents go an extra step. “Honey, you were having a bad dream. Then you woke up, half asleep, and saw what looked like something moving on the wall. I can see how, when it’s dark, and you’re half asleep, it could look like a monster. But now that you’re fully awake and the lights are on and Mommy and Daddy are here, let’s go over and see what we can tell about the wall.”

“Okay,” the comforted child says. They walk over to the wall, where the parent points to something.

“What do you think that is?” the parent asks.

“Shadows,” the child says.

“Where are they coming from?”

“The leaves from the tree outside the window.”

“When the wind blows, they move. I can see how it could look like a monster when you’re half asleep. Isn’t it funny how our brains can play tricks on us?”

This child has learned not only that his parents are there if he needs them but that he has the power to regulate intense feelings like fear by testing their reality.

Defense

Because they are Adult brain experiences, compassion and kindness offer the strongest possible protection from the worst kind of emotional pain: betrayed trust. As strange as it might seem, compassion and kindness makes us less likely to trust unwisely, as they provide deeper understanding of the frailties of those who are unable to regulate their core hurts without hurting others. As you become better able to discern when people are in the Toddler brain, it will be easier to tell when they’re manipulating, misleading, or trying to take advantage.

My primary example of the protection from unwise trust afforded by compassion and kindness comes from the work I’ve done in prisons. Some years ago we began an anger regulation group with multiple murderers. (Our hypothesis—that teaching violent criminals to create more value would make them more compassionate and thereby reduce crime—wasn’t exactly setting the state government afire with support. They’d let us test it only on a group of prisoners who would never again be free.) Already serving consecutive life terms, these hapless men had no incentive to refrain from violence against other prisoners. As one of them put it, “So they give me another life sentence, I’ll get out in the twenty-third century instead of the twenty-second.”

Multiple murderers tend to be in the system from early childhood. Their case files look like small mattresses. As I read page after page of social service reports documenting the terrible things that happened to these men as young children, I couldn’t help but develop deep compassion for their terrible suffering. This compassion helped me understand that the hurt these men had suffered was too great; they could not be trusted to regulate their vulnerabilities without hurting other people. When they again feel powerless under stress, they are likely to revert to their habitual form of self-empowerment: violence. The treatment helped them to do well in the highly controlled confines of prisons (it reduced their violence by 72 percent), but in the high-stress, complex world on the outside, they would too often feel powerless and would likely revert to their habits of exerting power over others. Compassion and kindness made this apparent in a way that resentment could not have done. In contrast, the resentment that makes us want to lock them up forever is eventually trumped by the knowledge that it costs about $50,000 a year to support them.

Here’s a more mundane example of the defensive virtues of compassion and kindness. Say my angry child calls me a terrible name. Compas­sion for her protects me from internal­iz­ing the insult as meaning that I am devalued or unlovable. Rather, I see that she feels devalued or unlovable. With that understanding I help her soothe her hurt with kindness, rather than keep us isolated in our resentment. I have a chance of teaching her respect by modeling it.

Choosing the World We Create

Most experts agree that by and large our brains create reality—not the events that happen around us but the meaning we give to those events. (The clichéd version is, some people make lemonade, while others swallow the bitterness.) In creating the meaning of our reality, we choose among alternative descriptions of what the world is:

How alone and forlorn or listless and uninspired or how safe and hopeful you perceive the world you live in depends on how valuable you feel. How valuable you feel depends on how much value you create. If you don’t recognize your inherent core value, derived from the basic humanity you share with other people, you will devalue others and provoke retaliation from them—or you’ll withdraw and others will ignore or criticize you, or you’ll cling to someone out of fear of abandonment. You won’t be able to balance the drives for autonomy and connection.

To feel safe, you have to remain true to your deeper values and your basic humanity, which means valuing those around you. If you begin with the smallest unit of social interaction, you’ll create a reality of light, promise, and connection.

The Smallest Unit
of Emotional Interaction

The smallest unit of emotional interaction is subtle, low-arousal motivation, which is faintly detectable in body posture, muscle tone, and facial expression. It’s typically unconscious and automatic; we’re simply not aware that we’re transmitting it. Yet it happens automatically whenever we walk by people (or animals), sit near them, or even ignore them. In cities and other congested areas, our unconscious, low-grade emotional response typically includes motivation to avoid. This affords a little privacy—a place to be alone with one’s thoughts in a crowd of people. The problem is that avoidance motivations nearly always stimulate a like response in others, creating a continual and highly contagious state of emotional disconnection. States of disconnection necessarily lower compassion, kindness, trust, and cooperation and often raise feelings of inadequacy and isolation. Worse, we misinterpret the smallest unit of emotional response as negative. It feels vaguely uncomfortable. To defend against this perceived negativity, we subtly shut out other people by not processing the sensory and emotional cues they project. To them, this automatic shutout feels vaguely like rejection and creates an impulse in them to reject others.

In truth, the slight rise of marginally uncomfortable feeling carries one simple message: “There is no emotional connection with the person you are now encountering.” You then have a choice: connect or avoid. By default, most of us avoid. And the people we avoid in turn avoid the people they encounter, who then avoid the people they encounter, and so on, with each person in the Web of Emotion passing along avoid motivations and the subtle negative emotions that go with them. This chronic low-grade negativity punches tiny holes in our hearts that inevitably fill with resentment or numbness.

The figure below shows how we contaminate the Web of Emotion, with each dot representing subtle negativity.

Negative Web

Positive Change

In the last chapter I asked you to imagine valuing everyone you encountered during the course of the day and then imagine devaluing everyone you encountered. Those two little exercises demonstrate that the way we feel—good and empowered or bad and powerless—is determined by the choice to increase the value of experience in the Adult brain or to decrease it by retreating to the Toddler brain. Your choice, whichever it is, will greatly increase the chances of getting a like vibration in the Web of Emotion.

Here’s an example of a choice to value or devalue that you make every time you stop at a traffic light. Think of the last time you were in a hurry and it seemed that the light changed abruptly. In that case, the fact that you had to stop felt like submission. If it did, you felt powerless and flustered. Not that it’s inaccurate to view having to stop as submission. You were yielding to a civil power greater than your own. But it is just as accurate to look at it the following way: by stopping at the red light, you ensured the safety of everyone who passed through the intersection, and by way of the Web of Emotion, you contributed to the safety and well-being of the community at large.

If you view stopping at the red light as submission, your Toddler brain will likely empower you with an aggressive impulse. You’ll fantasize about running the light or devaluing the person in front of you or the traffic control engineers who are supposed to synchronize the damn lights! Or maybe you turned the negative thinking onto coworkers or loved ones. In any case, this impulse to devalue degrades your contribution to the Web of Emotion. On the other hand, if you see stopping at the red light as protecting the safety and well-being of the community, you enrich your contribution to the Web of Emotion, as you control the value and meaning of your experience.

Remember, if your personal power does not come from creating value and meaning, it will almost certainly come from the Toddler brain—in the form of aggression—either overtly (in someone’s face), passively (behind their back), or merely in your imagination. Eventually this will have devastating effects on your emotional well-being, not to mention your relationships and job performance. And it won’t just affect you. The negative flow of your unconscious emotions will negatively affect the Web of Emotion. The people you influence negatively will influence others in the same way. All but the occasional Mother Teresa or Buddhist monk will carry that negative reactivity to everyone they encounter; most will take it home to their families.

Now here’s the good news about the Web of Emotion: it allows us to influence how compassionate and kind the world becomes. The social design of our brains contains the secret of happiness: influence others to attune to positive emotions. I’m not talking about Pollyannaish good cheer and positive thinking, which, after a while, become cloying and irritating to others. I mean connecting your most humane values to the most humane values of others, with the most subtle of low-grade approach motivation. Here’s how.

Imagine that everyone you pass by would rescue and comfort a desperate child. (The few sociopaths who might not do it cannot detract from the billions who would.) Try projecting your most heartfelt basic humanity image onto others. You’ll see that connecting your humanity to that of other people will raise your well-being substantially. Become passionate about it, and you will soar above.

Changing the World

You can save the world in a very simple way. Value everyone you see, connect your most humane values to theirs, and then let the principles of modeling, mimicry, emotional display, contagion, and reciprocity do their stuff. You don’t even have to make eye contact; it will work if you only do it in your head. Just regard everyone you see as a person of value. This creates a very subtle, mostly unconscious approach motivation, to which most people are likely to respond in kind, with subtle positive regard of the people they subsequently pass on the street. Many of the people you value on the street will take that unconscious, low-grade valuing state with them. They’re more likely to be nicer to their children and more pleasant to the people they see at work. And so will you.

Value every driver you see, even those who behave badly, and you’ll do a great deal to protect the safety of each child and adult with whom you share the road.

This new torrent of transmitting value along the Web of Emotion need not change your overt behavior at all. It will require next to no investment of time and energy. In fact, it will generate energy and give a sense of purpose to your time that might otherwise be empty or wasted. It will help you appreciate a fact that we easily ignore in our rushed and highly structured society: each person you pass on the street is as valuable as anyone in the world.

I value you—a thought to yourself but directed at others—is one of the most powerful statements you can make. In the long run, your contribution to the Web of Emotion will improve family life and help build communities. You will soar above as you make the world a better place. Every area of your life will improve if you wake up each morning thinking, I will spread good in the world today.

Once we understand that value flows out of us rather than into us, we realize our power to transmit value throughout the world. By virtue of the smallest unit of emotional response, we begin to create the Web of Compassion and Kindness.

Postscript

Here is a log to help you keep track of your positive contributions to the Web of Emotion. You will no doubt notice that when your score on positive contributions is high, you feel better.

Log of Contributions to the Web of Emotion

1 = not much

2 = some

3 = above average

4 = a lot

5 = most of the time

Today I silently regarded each person I encountered as:

Inherently important and valuable

___

Someone who would rescue a child in a desert

___

A person who can appreciate a sunset or something else in nature

___

Capable of compassion, kindness, and love

___