Just watched another great TED Talk* from last year: “The real crisis? We stopped being wise.” by Barry Schwartz.
A sensible and moving account of why it is so important for us to embrace virtue (again) – especially practical wisdom: to think, care and make wise moral decisions. He calls on the listener to “be an ordinary, if not extraordinary, hero” and do the right thing.
Another quote worth contemplating: “[…] the truth is that any work you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. Any any moral work depends on practical wisdom.”
Ah, if our bureaucratic, extreme capitalist, bottom-line society could only transition into a society of people who base their actions on caring about one another, making their own decisions and doing “the right thing.”
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* From the TED site: TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.