Nussbaum Quotes

You can’t really change the heart without telling a story.

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

Another problem with people who fail to examine themselves is that they often prove all too easily influenced.

We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the “concerned reader of a novel,” understanding each person’s life as a “complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles.

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you.

Play teaches people to be capable of living with others without control; it connects the experiences of vulnerability and surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than to crippling anxiety. How

It seems to me that good philosophy will always have a place in the investigation of any matter of deep human importance, because of its commitment to clarity, to carefully drawn distinctions, to calm argument rather than prejudice and dogmatic assertion" "Philosophical Interventions" (Reviews 1986-2011)

This day of torment, of craziness, of foolishness—only love can make it end in happiness and joy. —W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786)

Conception and form are bound together; finding and shaping the words is a matter of finding the appropriate...fit between conception and expression.

What are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?

The presence of the other, which can be very threatening, becomes, in play, a delightful source of curiosity, and this curiosity contributes toward the development of healthy attitudes in friendship, love, and, later, political life. Winnicott

EPICURUS WROTE, “Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.

Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder.

An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.

This tradition argues that education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world. This model of education supplanted an older one in which children sat still at desks all day and simply absorbed, and then regurgitated, the material that was brought their way.

To be a good human is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It's based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

We might say that there can be pity in its full-fledged form only where there is also mercy for self: for the self engulfed by a sense of its own utter blackness can never win through to a sufficient recognition of the sorrows of the other as other.

For a choice is always a choice among possible alternatives; and it is a rare agent for whom everything is possible. The special agony of this situation is that none of the possibilities is even harmless.

Walk your own path and be yourself

Anger is about status injury.

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

Decent people sometimes create bad art. Amoral people can and have created transcendent works. A cruel and selfish person—a criminal, even—might make something that was generous, life-giving, and humane. Or alternatively, they might create something that was grotesque in a way that you couldn’t tear your eyes away from it, full of contradictions that were themselves magnetic.

There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics.

All women live in sexual objectification the way fish swim in water.

Once you laugh with a person? That person is your friend.

The dignity of these humans is to weep.

Martha Nussbaum tiene razón cuando sostiene que la educación no nos libra necesariamente de los peores comportamientos..., pero la ignorancia los asegura.

Being a human means accepting promises from other people and trusting that other people will be good to you. When that is too much to bear, it is always possible to retreat into the thought, “I’ll live for my own comfort, for my own revenge, for my own anger, and I just won’t be a member of society anymore.” That really means, “I won’t be a human being anymore.

Here, I believe, was mercy; and, lying very close to it, the root of the novelist’s art. The novel’s structure is a structure of suggnômê—of the penetration of the life of another into one’s own imagination and heart. It is a form of imaginative and emotional receptivity, in which the reader, following the author’s lead, comes to be inhabited by the tangled complexities and struggles of other concrete lives.54 Novels do not withhold all moral judgment, and they contain villains as well as heroes. But for any character with whom the form invites our participatory identification, the motives for mercy are engendered in the structure of literary perception itself. VII.

We can, as Martha Nussbaum (2010) suggests, benefit from the enlarged and varied imagination that literature, films, and other cultural products afford us to start to occupy different positionings than we usually occupy.

The fact that a good and virtuous decision is context-sensitive does not imply that it is right only relative to, or inside, a limited context, any more than the fact that a good navigational judgement is sensitive to particular weather conditions shows that it is correct only in a local or relational sense. It is right absolutely, objectively, anywhere in the human world, to attend to the particular features of one's context; and the person who so attends and who chooses accordingly is making, according to Aris­totle, the humanly correct decision, period.

Renowned philosopher and Chicago University professor Martha C. Nussbaum told me in an interview after Modi’s 2012 victory, his third as Gujarat chief minister, that his triumph was a blot on the people of Gujarat who chose to “re-elect an outlaw”.

But it is to the school that Tagore devotes central emphasis in The Religion of Man.14 He begins by expressing his lifelong dissatisfaction with the schools he attended: “The inexpensive power to be happy, which, along with other children, I brought to this world, was being constantly worn away by friction with the brick-and-mortar arrangement of life, by monotonously mechanical habits and the customary code of respectability” (144). In effect, children begin as madcap Bauls, full of love, longing, and joy in the presence of nature. Their love of play and their questioning spirit need to be strengthened, not crushed. But schools usually crush all that is disorderly,

The problems that globalization and automation create for working-class Americans are real, deep, and seemingly intractable. Rather than face those difficulties and uncertainties, people who sense their living standard declining can instead grasp after villains, and a fantasy takes shape: if “we” can somehow keep “them” out (build a wall) or keep them in “their place” (in subservient positions), “we” can regain our pride and, for men, their masculinity. Fear leads, then, to aggressive “othering” strategies rather than to useful analysis.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, she dissects the darker history of positive thinking, the cult of optimism that has, in recent decades, she writes, metastasized into “an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy

Eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith, an early opponent of both colonial conquest and the slave trade, observed that it is difficult for people to sustain concern for people at a distance, when fear can so easily call the mind back to the self. His example is an earthquake in China. Hearing of the disaster, a humane person in Europe will be extremely upset and concerned—for a while. But if that same person hears that he (Smith typically imagines males) will lose his little finger the following day, he will completely forget the fate of millions of people: “the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.

la educación debería proporcionarnos los elementos necesarios para desenvolvernos de manera eficaz en ese diálogo multinacional, como “ciudadanos del mundo

Do not despise your inner world.

When you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you.

I'm its creature, the way we are all creatures of the art we care about, even if decide to throw it in a garbage can.

American consumers take pride in their media savvy; they are too hip to be fooled, too jaded to be appalled.

When you have just a number or two that you want to communicate: use the numbers directly.

Using a table in a live presentation is rarely a good idea. As your audience reads it, you lose their ears and attention to make your point verbally. When

You should always want your audience to know or do something. If you can't concisely articulate that, you should revisit whether you need to communicate in the first place.

a moral lasagna of questionable aesthetic choices

These days, we are all performing what a friend of mine once called “the audit,” struggling to reconcile the stories we used to tell ourselves with the ones we tell ourselves now.

Der Nussbaum lächelte. Elayne kniff die Augen zusammen und versuchte, genauer hinzusehen. Doch, sie war sich sicher: Er lächelte. Natürlich hatte er keinen Mund, keine Lippen, die sich wie die Sichel eines Halbmondes nach oben biegen konnten. Auch waren da keine Wangen, die sich zu kleinen Äpfeln formten, und keine Augen. Der Baum hatte kein Gesicht. Kein menschenliches zumindest.

When I see Peter at the bus the next morning, he’s standing around with all this lacrosse friends, and at first I feel shy and nervous, but then he sees me, and his face breaks into a grin. “C’mere, Covey,” he says, so I go to him and he throws my tote over his shoulder. In my ear he says, “You’re sitting with me, right?” I nod. As we make our way onto the bus, somebody wolf whistles. It seems like people are staring at us, and at first I think it’s just my imagination, but then I see Genevieve look right at me and whisper to Emily Nussbaum. It sends a chill down my spine. “Genevieve keeps staring at me,” I whisper to Peter. “It’s because you’re so adorably quirky,” he says, and he rests his hands on my shoulders and gives me a kiss on the cheek, and I forget all about Genevieve.

Will you be encountering each other for the first time through this communication, or do you have an established relationship? Do they already trust you as an expert, or do you need to work to establish credibility? These are important considerations when it comes to determining how to structure your communication and whether and when to use data, and may impact the order and flow of the overall story you aim to tell.

And what is “the West”? It is not a geographical entity, since it includes Australia and Poland and excludes nations such as Egypt and Morocco that are further west than some of the included nations. And, as Beinart notes, it is not a political or economic term either, since Japan, South Korea, and India are not included. Basically, it is an appeal to shared religion and shared racial identity: to Christianity (with some Jews included) and to whiteness (since Latin America does not appear to be included).

Tragedy happens only when you are trying to live well, because for a heedless person who doesn’t have deep commitments to others, conflit isn't a tragedy. Now the lesson certainly is not to try to maximize conflict or to romanticize struggle and suffering, but it’s rather that you should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you. But you want people to live their lives with a deep seriousness of commitment: not to adjust their desires to the way the world actually goes, but rather to try to wrest from the world the good life that they desire. And sometimes that does lead them into tragedy.

The firm’s fourth partner, Jeff Nussbaum, had carved out a niche writing jokes for public figures. It was he who taught me about the delicate balance all public-sector humorists hope to strike. Writing something funny for a politician, I learned, is like designing something stunning for Marlon Brando past his prime. The qualifier is everything. At first I didn’t understand this. In June, President Obama’s speechwriters asked Jeff to pitch jokes for an upcoming appearance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. I sent him a few ideas, including one about the president and First Lady’s recent trip to see a Broadway show: “My critics are upset it cost taxpayer dollars to fly me and Michelle to New York for date night. But let me be clear. That wasn’t spending. It was stimulus.” Unsurprisingly, my line about stimulating America’s first couple didn’t make it into the script. But others did. The morning after the speech, I watched on YouTube as President Obama turned to NBC reporter Chuck Todd. “Chuck embodies the best of both worlds: he has the rapid-fire style of a television correspondent, and the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” That was my joke! I grabbed the scroll bar and watched again. The line wasn’t genius. The applause was largely polite. Still, I was dumbfounded. A thought entered my brain, and then, just a few days later, exited the mouth of the president of the United States. This was magic. Still, even then, I had no illusions of becoming a presidential speechwriter. When friends asked if I hoped to work in the White House, I told them Obama had more than enough writers already. I meant it.

the Jim Crow South, often the plates off which black people had eaten were broken so that they could not be used again. Baseball great Hank Aaron describes this common practice in his autobiography, noting, “If dogs had eaten off those plates, they’d have washed them.”21 So the US South had convoluted and bizarre practices regarding food: blacks could cook and serve food for whites, but they were thought to contaminate the plates they themselves used.

As the medium changed and more “auteurist” shows got green-lighted, and as “showrunner” became a term of art, turning television writers into celebrities with their own fan bases, shows that could be traced to one clear creator often got more credit from critics—a bias that tended, among other things, to favor drama over comedy. To quote BoJack Horseman: “Diane, the whole point of television is it’s a collaborative medium where one person gets all the credit.

From the 1960s on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh realpolitik, one based on her experience: Looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money - and from men as the route to money - you were dead in the water. Women were one another's competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn't cross over.

Leidenschaft trägt uns weiter als Disziplin.

Glücksforscher haben herausgefunden, dass es in Wirklichkeit nicht das Erreichen eines Zieles ist, was uns glücklich macht. Glücklich macht es uns, ein Ziel überhaupt anzustreben.

Geld, Häuser, Autos, Uhren, Kleidung - all das kann man Ihnen irgendwann mal wieder nehmen. Aber alles, was Sie in sich selbst investieren, das bleibt Ihnen und kann ein Sprungbrett sein für Erfolg.

Immer wieder ist mir aufgefallen, dass Belohnungen nach einiger Zeit dafür sorgten, dass das gewünschte Verhalten nur mehr widerwillig an den Tag gelegt wurde. [...] Lesen macht offenbar keinen Spaß - sonst müssten Mama und Papa mich ja nicht mit Schokolade bestechen. [...] Die ureigene Lust an einer Tätigkeit wirkt eindeutig länger.

Seien Sie bereit, den Preis für eine Entscheidung zu bezahlen. Eine »falsche« Entscheidung ist besser als keine Entscheidung. »Keine Entscheidung« haben Sie ja bereits.

»Mein Leben ist schön, weil ich es mir schön mache.«

Wenn wir Dinge nicht tun, dann darf es uns später nicht leidtun, dass wir es nicht getan haben.

Bis zu einem gewissen Punkt macht uns mehr Auswahl glücklicher und dann kippt es wieder. [...] Bei zehn Schachteln waren die Auswählenden zufriedener mit ihrer Entscheidung als bei fünf Optionen, und 30 Möglichkeiten machten sie genauso unfroh wie sechs.

Führen Sie sich immer wieder vor Augen, dass SIE für sich und Ihr Leben verantwortlich sind. Und tun Sie das vor allem auch bei Ihren Kindern. Erinnern Sie Ihre Kinder [...], dass sie die Freiheit haben, zu entscheiden. [...] Lassen Sie sie die Küche oder das Bad aufräumen und putzen - auch wenn es nicht perfekt ist. Allein das eigenverantwortliche Tun lässt Kinder wachsen. [...] Sie lernen von früh auf, auf sich selbst zu achten, sich selbst zu beschäftigen. Sie lernen, dass sie es selbst in der Hand haben, wie wohl sie sich fühlen.

Wohin kann mich diese Erfahrung bringen? Was kann ich daraus lernen? Welche Türen stehen mir dadurch offen?" (bzgl. negative Erfahrungen)

Wir können andere Menschen nicht »motivieren«, das können sie nur selbst.

Sich für eine billigere Variante entscheiden zu können, weil wir es so WOLLEN, lässt uns wahre Freiheit und wahres Glück erleben. Die billigere Variante nehmen zu MÜSSEN, weil wir gar keine Wahl haben, das macht unzufrieden. Und führt bisweilen dazu, dass wir aus der Wut heraus doch die teurere Variante wählen.

Stärken Sie immer wieder Ihr Autonomiegefühl. Tauschen Sie dazu ab sofort in jedem Ihrer Sätze das »Ich muss« gegen ein »Ich will« aus. [...] Forscher haben herausgefunden, dass es ernorm wichtig für unser Glücksempfinden und unsere Zufriedenheit ist, dass wir eigene Entscheidungen über unser Leben treffen können. [...] Der größte Glücksfaktor ist es, selbstbestimmt zu sein.

the fastest growing major in the United States today is the double major (one popular choice combines computer science with art and design).

Embodiment begins with knowing yourself—who you are, what cultures you belong to, and what you want to create in the world.

Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder. The more information you’re dealing with, the more difficult it is to filter

Sometimes bar charts are avoided because they are common. This is a mistake. Rather, bar charts should be leveraged because they are common, as this means less of a learning curve for your audience.

I was hardly a major sex radical in my personal life, but I nonetheless thought of myself as a member of the “pro-sex” resistance, even if no one in that resistance knew I existed.

lot for me when I get off the bus. “Hey,” he says. “Are you seriously taking the bus every day?” “My car is being fixed, remember? My accident?” He sighs like this is somehow offensive to him, me taking the bus to school. Then he grabs my hand and holds it as we walk into school together. This is the first time I’ve walked down the school hallway holding hands with a boy. It should feel momentous, special, but it doesn’t, because it’s not real. Honestly, it feels like nothing. Emily Nussbaum does a double take when she sees us. Emily is Gen’s best friend. She’s staring so hard I’m surprised she doesn’t take a quick pic on her phone to send to Gen. Peter keeps stopping to say hi to people, and I stand there smiling like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Me and

Another important factor in expanding the circle is exposure to stories. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains how stories teach children to empathize and identify with people whose perspectives and identities may be very different from their own: “We see personlike shapes all around us: but how do we relate to them?… What storytelling in childhood teaches us to do is to ask questions about the life behind the mask, the inner world concealed by the shape. It gets us into the habit of conjecturing that this shape, so similar to our own, is a house for emotions and wishes and projects that are also in some ways similar to our own; but it also gets us into the habit of understanding that that inner world is differently shaped by different social circumstances.

Solemos pensar mejor y relacionarnos de forma más eficaz unos con otros cuando tomamos cierta distancia de lo cotidiano, que es donde es más probable que estén centrados nuestros temores y deseos más inmediatos.

Rousseau entendió que, en sus inicios, la vida humana no es una democracia, sino una monarquía. El bebé, fervorosamente mimado por quienes cuidan de él, no tiene otra vía de supervivencia que no sea la de esclavizar a otros. Los bebés son tan débiles que deben mandar para no morir. Por su incapacidad para el trabajo compartido o para la reciprocidad, solo pueden conseguir las cosas mediante órdenes y amenazas, y aprovechándose del amor reverencial que les dispensan otros individuos.

Aristóteles definió el miedo como el dolor producido por la aparente presencia inminente de algo malo o negativo, acompañado de una sensación de impotencia para repelerlo.

La política de la envidia a veces se limita sinceramente a la idea de que “queremos lo que ellos (mujeres, inmigrantes, miembros de la élite) tienen”. Pero a las personas les encanta moralizar su envidia y, muy a menudo, lo que empieza siendo pura envidia deriva hacia un “son malas personas, no merecen lo que tienen”.

Klein se centró en la existencia de diferencias entre familias e ignoró la dimensión social y política. Pero es evidente (como argumentó Rawls) que las comunidades políticas pueden hacer también mucho por convertir la envidia en un problema mucho menos perturbador. Pueden cultivar en las personas una confianza segura tanto en sí mismas como en su posibilidad de acceso a las cosas buenas de la vida; pueden minimizar aquellas ocasiones en las que el estímulo de envidiar se hace inusualmente intenso, y pueden facilitar a las personas alternativas constructivas que impliquen generosidad y amor a los demás.

El miedo tiende con demasiada frecuencia a bloquear la deliberación racional, envenena la esperanza e impide la cooperación constructiva en pos de un futuro mejor.

Los problemas reales son difíciles de solucionar, y resolverlos lleva mucho tiempo de estudio a fondo de los mismo y de trabajo cooperativo con vistas a un futuro que nunca deja de ser incierto. De ahí que pueda resultar tan atractivamente fácil transformar esa sensación de pánico e impotencia en culpabilización y en una “alterización” de los grupos “diferentes”, como son los inmigrantes, las minorías raciales y las mujeres. “Ellos/as” nos han quitado nuestros trabajos. O, si no: la élite opulenta nos ha robado nuestro país.

En lugar de analizar la cuestión con seriedad y de escuchar los argumento de la otra parte, tratando de comprender a fondo los diversos aspectos de la realidad, tienden a demonizar a nada menos que a la mitad del electorado estadounidense calificando a esos votantes de monstruos y de enemigos de todo lo bueno. Como en el libro del Apocalipsis, estaríamos, según ellos, en el fin de los tiempos, en el momento en que unos pocos justos, aún en pie, deben luchar contra las fuerzas de Satán.

Es fácil que el miedo vaya por delante del pensamiento reflexivo. Y es esa estampida que nos empuja a actuar precipitadamente, provocada por la inseguridad, la que yo contemplo con gran escepticismo. Esa clase de miedo socavada la fraternidad, envenena la cooperación y nos lleva a hacer cosas de las que nos avergonzamos profundamente más tarde.

Pensar cuesta; es mucho más fácil temer y culpar.

Cuando experimentamos el miedo, estamos utilizando una herencia animal común, no exclusiva de los primates ni, tan siquiera, de los vertebrados. El miedo se remonta directamente al cerebro reptiliano.

Mucho es lo que cabe decir del miedo a la muerte. Nos mueve buscar seguridad, salud e incluso paz. Nos mueve a dar cobijo a las personas y seres a los que queremos, y a proteger instituciones y sistemas legales preciados para nosotros.

En una serie de famosos experimentos, el psicólogo Salomon Asch mostró que las personas presentan un nivel sorprendentemente elevado de sumisión a la presión de grupo, aun cuando sus iguales de ese grupo estén diciendo cosas que son evidentemente falsas, incluso sobre algo tan objetivo como cuál de las dos líneas que se les están mostrando es más larga (en una comparación en la que es evidente cuál es la respuesta correcta).

Asch también descubrió que bastaba con que una sola persona se atreviera a expresar su opinión y diera la respuesta correcta ante el sujeto del experimento para que este se sintiera liberado para responder correctamente también. El desacuerdo hace que la mente se libere del miedo.

¿Cómo puede una nación en su conjunto constituir un “ambiente facilitador” que calme el miedo y proteja la reciprocidad democrática?

Los ciudadanos pueden volverse entonces indiferentes a la verdad y optar por la comodidad de un grupo de iguales en el que aislarse y en el que repetirse falsedades unos a otros. Puede que comiencen a temer dar su opinión y prefieran el consuelo de un líder que les proporcione una sensación de protección como la del interior del seno materno. Y puede que se vuelvan agresivos unos con otros y que se culpen del dolor del miedo.

Quejarse y culpar son reacciones positivas hasta cierto punto: sirven para construir un mundo ordenado y dotado de sentido en el que yo soy un agente y formulo demandas. Mi vida es valiosa y las cosas deberían estar dispuestas de tal modo que yo sea feliz y mis necesidades estén satisfechas. Como eso no ha ocurrido, alguien debe cargar con las culpas. Pero la idea misma de la culpa está demasiado a menudo infectada por el virus del “modo vengativo” de pensar o por la idea del castigo: las personas a las que estoy culpando deberían sufrir por lo que han hecho.

Muchos estadounidenses (hombres y mujeres) consideran que las represalias son un signo de hombría: un hombre de verdad (o una mujer fuerte) devuelve el golpe cuando le hacen daño a él o a los suyos. No todas las culturas han pensado así. Los griegos y los romanos antiguos creían que la ira era un síntoma de debilidad y, por consiguiente, una reacción infantil o, incluso, “mujeril”, pues consideraban que las mujeres eran criaturas débiles. La verdadera fortaleza, pensaban, está en no dejarse arrastrar por el juego de responder a la “sangre con sangre”. En la mitología antigua, el castigo vengativo es malo, como bien ilustró el trágico griego Esquilo al caracterizar a las furias, diosas de la venganza, como unas bestias sucias y venenosas para la política por su incapacidad para pensar en el bienestar humano.

Como ese buen padre al que me refería, pensaremos que las personas no cometen actos indebidos con tanta frecuencia si se sienten depositarias de un amor y un respeto básicos, si pueden alimentarse, si reciben una educación adecuada, si están sanas y si prevén un futuro de oportunidades ante sí. Así pues, reflexionar sobre el delito y la criminalidad nos guiará por la senda de diseñar una sociedad en la que las personas tengan menores incentivos para delinquir. Y cuando, aun pese a nuestros esfuerzos por evitarlo, delincan, nos tomaremos sus delitos muy en serio, pensando en el futuro.

Nos aferramos a la información equivocada acerca de quien hizo qué, o culpamos a unos individuos y a unos grupos de un gran problema sistémico que ellos no causaron. Sobrevaloramos agravios triviales y, al mismo tiempo, infravaloramos otros que sí son importantes. Nos obsesionamos por nuestro propio estatus relativo (o por el de nuestro grupo). Pensamos que la venganza resolverá los problemas creados por el delito o la ofensa original, aun cuando no sea así.

Los psicólogos han realizado muchos estudios sobre la percepción instintiva que tenemos la personas de cómo funciona el mundo, y han descubierto que tenemos una necesidad profundamente arraigada de creer que el mundo es justo. Uno de los aspectos de esta “hipótesis del mundo justo” es la tendencia a creer que las personas que están en peor situación se han buscado su desgracia porque han sido perezosas o se han portado mal. Pero otro aspecto relacionado con esa creencia en un “Mundo justo” es la necesidad de creer que, cuando somos nosotros quienes sufrimos una pérdida o una adversidad, la nuestra no es una desgracia sin más, sino que es culpa de las malas acciones de otro u otros, y que podemos recuperarnos en cierta medida de esa pérdida castigando al “Malo”.

Nuestra predilección por un universo en orden convierte en muy tentadoras para nosotros esas simples soluciones ficticias. Las verdades complejas son difíciles de asimilar para nuestras mentes: nos resulta mucho más fácil incinerar a la bruja que mantener la esperanza en un mundo que no está hecho para el deleite humano.