Uplifting Morale Quotes

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Rumours should be juicy and gossips must be mouth-watering, since they have to uplift and make people feel better. Tittle-tattle can have a swift ripple effect and when the ball is rolling very fast, it kick-starts a flood of moral destruction. “Schadenfreude” can, then, be fully enjoyed. (“Juicy rumours”)

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason

The failure of political leaders to help uplift the poor will be judged a moral failure.

To have a different life you have be a different person. You have to do what you haven't done. You have to become the person that fits that dream. But most of all, you have to realize that if you don't step into your story it becomes the moral of the story. Your inaction is a lesson you leave to your kids-- I was too afraid to change.

There may be something going on in your life right now, that seems like a giant, so big that you think it's impossible to conquer. But, remember no matter how gigantic your problems may be, you have everything in you to overcome. You have the power to say to that mountain move, get out my way. Activate your faith, and watch it happen. The victory is yours!

Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better - a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior--benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control. 'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.' 'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed. 'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course--as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.

For all other things, which arouse our desires, depress the soul and weaken it, and when we think that they are uplifting the soul, they are merely puffing it up and cheating it with much emptiness. Therefore, that alone is good which will make the soul better.

Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.” Lump it or leave it. Nationalism is a harmful belief that can lead a country down a dangerous spiral of arrogance, or off a precipice of political narcissism. Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely. Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected. The patriot is the person who, spotting the need for change, says so clearly and loudly, without hate or rancor. The nationalist is the person who spurns such correction and would rather take refuge in bigotry than fight it. It is the nationalists who wrap themselves in a flag and loudly proclaim themselves as patriots. That is dangerous, as glimpsed in Trump’s amplification of racist and xenophobic sentiments. In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot. Beloved,

Future artificial intelligence is more about uplifting human values, morality, and integrity. It is more about stopping the misuse of computing power and stopping human exploitation and suffering.

Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche’s useful phrase, ‘the bad odours of religion’. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don’t go on pilgrimages. We can’t build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. Strangers rarely sing together. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

There are two types of laws, those that are just and those that are unjust. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law...Any law that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human be-havior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

An artist doesn't really owe anybody anything...You don't have to be politically correct. You don't have to be nice. You don't have to write things that are morally uplifting. All you have to do is write, or create, something that is great.

As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full of himself, concerned with what he would write and with his early (and, later, perennial) hatred of Ireland and the Irish. When he had still written only a few poems, he asked his brother Stanislaus: “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own…for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.” When he was older his comparisons may have been less eucharistic and more modest, but he was always convinced of the extreme importance of his work, even before it existed.

Here was the idea of service and moral uplift brought into disruptive relief: What if women, in service to greater and moral good, did not submit themselves to a larger power structure, but instead organized to overturn it?

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.

Today, a similar debate rages in black communities about the underlying causes of mass incarceration. While some argue that it is attributable primarily to racial bias and discrimination, others maintain that it is due to poor education, unraveling morals, and a lack of thrift and perseverance among the urban poor. Just as former slaves were viewed (even among some African Americans) as unworthy of full citizenship due to their lack of education and good morals, today similar arguments can be heard from black people across the political spectrum who believe that reform efforts should be focused on moral uplift and education for ghetto dwellers, rather than challenging the system of mass incarceration itself.

In a 1840 letter to the The Lowell Offering, the publication of the Massachusetts mill town that employed thousands of young, single women and would become one of the birth places of the later labor movement, a correspondent named Betsey claiming to be “one of that unlucky, derided, and almost despised set of females, called spinsters, single sisters, lay-nuns . . . but who are more usually known by the appellation of Old Maids” argued that it was “a part of [God’s] wise design that there should be Old Maids,” in part because “they are the founders and pillars of anti-slavery, moral reform, and all sorts of religious and charitable societies.”28 Here was the idea of service and moral uplift brought into disruptive relief: What if women, in service to greater and moral good, did not submit themselves to a larger power structure, but instead organized to overturn it? Frederick

The most obvious is religious faith. To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason. Religions also commonly clash with humanism whenever they elevate some moral good above the well-being of humans, such as accepting a divine savior, ratifying a sacred narrative, enforcing rituals and taboos, proselytizing other people to do the same, and punishing or demonizing those who don’t. Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives, which is not as uplifting as it sounds. Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one’s existence; that coercing people into accepting salvation is doing them a favor; and that martyrdom may be the best thing that can ever happen to you.

Trump defended what he had said. “It’s not as if one side has any sort of [monopoly] on hatred or on bigotry. It’s not as if any one group is at fault or anything like that. With the media, you’re never going to get a fair shake. Anything that you say or do is going to be criticized.” “You need to fix this,” Porter argued. “You don’t want to be perceived the way in which you’re being perceived now. You need to bring the country together.” That was the moral obligation. “There’s no upside to not directly condemn neo-Nazis and those that are motivated by racial animus. There is a huge rift in the country.” Porter played heavily to the president’s ego and desire to be at the center. He said that the president could be a kind of healer in chief, consoler in chief. “The country is counting on you rhetorically to help salve the wounds and point a direction forward,” Porter said. The president could inspire and uplift. He could make this about him, the redeemer. Trump did not push back but he didn’t say yes.

The fact that conceiving gods does not necessarily, in itself, have to lead to this degraded imagination, that’s something we could not excuse ourselves from recalling for a moment, the point that there are more uplifting ways to use the invention of the gods than for this human self-crucifixion and self-laceration, in which Europe in the last millennia has become an expert — fortunately that’s something we can still infer with every glance we cast at the Greek gods, these reflections of nobler men, more rulers of themselves, in whom the animal in man felt himself deified and did not tear himself apart, did not rage against himself! These Greeks for the longest time used their gods for the very purpose of keeping that “bad conscience” at a distance, in order to be permitted to continue enjoying their psychic freedom. Hence, their understanding was the opposite of how Christianity used its God. In this matter the Greeks went a very long way, these splendid and lion-hearted Greeks, with their child-like minds. And no lesser authority than that of Homer’s Zeus himself now and then lets them understand that they are making things too easy for themselves.

The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don't get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don't need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure-to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life's blows. Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly-by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.” These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don't deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope. The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you're told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days. We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion. So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.

So that no matter how morally degenerated one may be, he can uplift himself to a high ethical plane by the widening of his self, and at the same time no matter how morally exalted one may be, he can descend to the level of the brute by the narrowing of his self.

it is the overcoming of egoism, the destroying of mean desires, the uplifting of the moral ideal, and the disclosing of inborn wisdom. [FN#12]

Faith must be living and growing, and the living and growing faith should assume no fixed form. It might seem for a superficial observer to take a fixed form, as a running river appears constant, though it goes through ceaseless changes. The dead faith, immutable and conventional, makes its embracer appear religious and respectable, while it arrests his spiritual growth. It might give its owner comfort and pride, yet it at bottom proves to be fetters to his moral uplifting. It is on this account that Zen declares: "Buddha is nothing but spiritual chain or moral fetters,

The greatest businesspeople I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost. And by getting it right, I’m not just talking about the business. I mean that there is something uplifting, some vision, some higher end in sight that “getting it right” would serve. An ethical certainty, a moral principle, a universal truth.

What’s the alternative? Those who think that a core task of art is political instruction or moral uplift will wind up with some version of socialist realism or religious dogma. And those who think that the worth of art must be judged according to the moral and political commitments of its creator ultimately consign all art to the dustbin, since even the most avant-garde artists are creatures of their time.

Israel’s formation, the light out of the Shoah’s darkness, has long been held up as an uplifting coda to the Holocaust, an exemplar of the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice.

Washington's emphasis on personal self-reliance and moral and religious rectitude as the keys to individual progress corresponded to Roosevelt's vision for uplifting yeoman farmers, immigrant laborers, ranch hands, and factory workers of whatever race or region. Roosevelt was convinced that if the "common man," whether black or white, followed these principles and that government ensured that no unjust legal obstacles impeded him, then the United States could achieve immeasurable progress.

A true writer has a moral duty to uplift humanity.

What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics--not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction "ethics," the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.

It’s not nothing to witness acts of goodness. In fact, it creates an expansive, uplifted, physical feeling in our bodies that psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “moral elevation.” It impacts us—and changes us. This is documented. Witnessing other people doing good makes us want to do better ourselves. And don’t forget: We learn by watching.

The self-destruction of a group always follows the same patterns. You only need to introduce some viruses to the group and poof, it’s all gone. These viruses come in the form of very ignorant narcissists that nobody has the courage to kick off of the group. Quite often, the group even promotes itself as being against the personalities that are in front of their eyes every day, people they praise and even lead them. And well, that’s how you know a group is truly finished. Scientology is a very interesting example of this, because of how clear their books are. For example, they claim to love artists but end up insulting real artists. Scientologists are so obsessed with being perceived as artists, that they downgrade real art in the process. You have many scientologists, for example, that think splashing a random amount of ink into a white board is art. They all want to be artists, and that’s fine, but they are too lazy to see how real art is made, and so, they downgrade the value of art. And in doing this, they actually distort the meaning of art and decrease the value of the real artists. And so, a group that promotes itself as being uplifting and positive, ends up being offensive and destructive. They have all these books on moral codes and moral behavior, and dozens of courses on the same topic, and if you report a scientologist for criminal behavior, they ignore you and deem you an attacker of the group. And there goes the level of sanity of this group down the scale, while they themselves invert the scale and tell you the opposite story. It would be like looking at your mental health through someone suffering with poor mental health. They are as aware of what I am saying as any mentally ill person is aware of his mental illnesses. If anyone confronts them with the facts, they themselves get offended, and then proceed to attack, because that’s what they think their founder told them to do. Except that the founder was talking about attacking insanity and not people. In other words, they should use these facts to look further into their books and their own misinterpretations, and which they don’t. Those people that splash random colors into a white board, will then tell you, the one who has been using techniques, and winning awards, and creating something unique, that you don’t understand art. They remind me of the writers with one book that doesn't sell, trying to tell me how they are better than me, with more than 100 books in best selling charts. How delusional, arrogant and stupid has one to be to not see this? The level of awareness of such individual is comparable to a drunk person going to a Jujitsu dojo, asking the instructor to fight him because he is convinced he can beat anyone with all that alcohol in his head. That, however, is not the cherry on top of the cake. The cherry on top of the cake, is when a religious group listens to a psychopath talking against psychopaths. You can write many academic papers on this topic and never reach a conclusion, because it's really hard to make conclusions on stupidity. So what’s wrong with religion? Why are some religious groups persecuted and attacked? The answer to these questions isn’t as relevant as what we can observe people doing, when denying the most obvious writings, inverting them and distorting the meanings. Christians have already mastered this art.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw Protestant evangelicalism enter India. And while Christian missions did much good – in education, uplifting the marginalized and exposing failures even of the Company – as far as Indian elites were concerned, they were a thorn in the side. In Travancore, for example, converts from low castes, empowered by their new identity, now aspired to equality with their ex-superiors. As a Dewan argued, by ‘violating the existing social distinctions’, the new Christians were bound to ‘annoy the high castes’, who demanded retribution. For generations, battles would be fought on dress, access to roads, temples, and even government buildings, and much of the reform Travancore grew famous for owed to this tension with missionaries, and the confidence they gave disempowered segments. Missionaries, however, also tended to magnify the evils they saw, to gain financial sympathy at home, for example. In 1848, thus, it was alleged that Travancore had a ‘professed torturer’, an expert in ‘twenty-three modes’ of abuse, on its payroll. In 1855 the state was described as ‘a perfect pandemonium of torture and misgovernment’. But the core problem was a clash of moralities, causing even the maharajah ‘great uneasiness’.77 As a Hindu king his duty lay in preserving the way things were; or as he said: ‘As my kingdom was in my predecessors’ time, so let it remain, and so let it descend to my heir.’78 His critics, however, wished to smash that caste-based order with a new conception of justice. Which side prevailed at any given moment depended also on higher-ups – Resident Cullen was sympathetic to the maharajah, while the infamous governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, showed personally an evangelical bent.

Reputation laundering works because it’s assumed that the folks who support fine music would be less likely to commit heinous crimes than the human flotsam that frequent a honky-tonk or a techno club. Participating in the scrums and mosh pits at pop concerts must be less morally and psychologically uplifting than sitting stock-still in complete silence at the ballet.

White Fragility Sonnet (A Record of White Crimes Against Humanity) Whiteness has done more harm to the world than good, Till you look past your whiteness, you cannot be human. Orange 'n musky trash of white privilege diss diversity, What else would you expect from colonial descendants! Every generation has its fraudsters like Edison, Every generation has trashy maniacs like Columbus. Every generation has war-merchants like Kissinger, Every generation has its churchillian doofus. White people tortured the Africans, White people booted Native Americans; White people massacred the Vietnamese, White people lynched and looted the Indians. White people caused genocide after genocide, Yet you still boast about white superiority. You proclaim that people of color are inferior, While white society is the epitome of savagery. If devil had a color, it would be white - Yet I say, color is nonsense, we're all equal. I am human enough to give you place beside me, All I expect is that, a human behaves human. After all the heartaches inflicted by white people, A 100 generations worth apology won't be sufficient. Yet I am human enough to declare, we are all equal; All I ask is that, humans finally behave human. They say, I'm spreading hate against the whites; To which I say, human making is my mission. There is no hope for humanitarian uplift, Unless you renounce all fragile intoleration. If you wanna learn about tolerance, ask a person of color, How do you even tolerate the sight of white people, when the wrongs done to you by whites are unparalleled in history! You'll realize, there's no mythical secret to integration, For ages we've known no other life but of inclusivity. Middle East, India and Far East, have been the melting pot of integration, before the whites even knew what integration is. Yet you say white people are superior - so be it; Cowards always take refuge in fairytales, to justify their fragility and prejudice. If you wanna be a decent human being, Never draw moral parameters from the west. No matter whether you're born of east or west, Remember, you are human first, then all else. To recognize diversity is science, To celebrate diversity is humanity. To recognize privilege is common sense, To abandon privilege builds human society.

in the case of generosity the effect is amplified by what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “moral elevation.” When we witness a good act on the part of someone else to a third party, it has an actual physical effect on us—a warm feeling of uplift that inspires us to want to follow suit, thereby creating the potential for a chain reaction of kindness.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing, never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing [amoral aristocratic radicalism], never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

WHEN PEOPLE DISCOVER that there is such a thing as spirituality, they understandably feel as excited as did Columbus upon setting eyes on the shores of America. Spirituality affords them a broader vista than they ever considered possible. They suddenly realize that conventional society is designed—partly consciously but for the most part quite unconsciously—to prevent us from seeing our full potential as human beings. Conventional life primarily revolves around the pursuit of rather limited goals: physical comfort, material possessions, sex, emotional gratification, mental stimulation, and power. According to Hinduism, there are four legitimate pursuits to which we can dedicate our time and energy: (1) artha—material welfare, (2) kāma—physical, emotional, and intellectual satisfaction, (3) dharma—morality (notably, justice), and (4) moksha—spiritual fulfillment. Much, if not most, of conventional life falls into the categories of artha and kāma. Our civilization has invented countless ways to keep our attention focused on comfort and pleasure. Every year billions of dollars are spent in advertising to make sure that we keep up our consumption of material goods, whether we need them or not, and that we strive for a “comfortable” life. Dharma is pursued in a much more limited way. Our moral standards appear to be at an all-time low, which is in keeping with the Indic notion of the kali-yuga or dark age, which is expected to prevail upon Earth for many millennia more. By comparison, the contemporary New Age belief in the imminent upliftment of humankind, by magical fiat and without any effort at all, appears like a mere whimsical hope. We must acknowledge that American society in particular suffers from widespread injustice in the legal system and that litigation has become a way of life. If moral integrity is not high on our list of priorities, spiritual aspiration is almost entirely absent from our lives. Few people really understand what spirituality is, and fewer still actively pursue a spiritual path.

Peter Paul Simons, known for criticizing the Colored American editor for believing that biracial people had “the most talent,” became one of the first African Americans to publicly attack the idea of uplift suasion. Before the African Clarkson Society in New York City on April 23, 1839, Simons said the strategy reeked of a conspiracy that put “white men at the head of even our private affairs.” The “foolish thought of moral elevation” was “a conspicuous scarecrow.” Blacks were already a moral people, the antiracist said. “Show up to the world an African and you will show in truth morality.” Simon demanded protest, calling for “ACTION! ACTION! ACTION!

There is a big difference between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.” Lump it or leave it. Nationalism is a harmful belief that can lead a country down a dangerous spiral of arrogance, or off a precipice of political narcissism. Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely. Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected. The patriot is the person who, spotting the need for change, says so clearly and loudly, without hate or rancor. The nationalist is the person who spurns such correction and would rather take refuge in bigotry than fight it. It is the nationalists who wrap themselves in a flag and loudly proclaim themselves as patriots. That is dangerous, as glimpsed in Trump’s amplification of racist and xenophobic sentiments. In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot.

In the mid-1950s, Governor Luther Hodges cited Aycock’s “march of progress” in his defense of Jim Crow as a system that both ensured political tranquility and enabled racial uplift. His successor in the state house, Terry Sanford, noted that Aycock famously proclaimed “as a white man, I am afraid of but one thing for my race and that is we shall become afraid to give the Negro a fair chance. The white man in the South can never attain to his fullest growth until he does absolute justice to the Negro race.” This framing enabled Hodges, Sanford, and, later, Governor Dan Moore to define the “North Carolina way” in sharp contrast with the racially charged massive resistance rhetoric that defined the approaches of Alabama under George Wallace and Mississippi under Ross Barnett. This moderate course caused early observers like V. O. Key to view the state as “an inspiring exception to southern racism.” Crucially, it operated hand-in-hand with North Carolina’s anti-labor stance to advance the state’s economic interests. Hodges, Sanford, and Moore approached racial policy by emphasizing tranquility, and thus an intolerance for political contention. These officials placed a high value on law and order, condemning as “extremists” those who threatened North Carolina’s “harmonious” race relations by advocating either civil rights or staunch segregation. While racial distinctions could not be elided in the Jim Crow South, where the social fabric was shot through with racial disparity, an Aycock-style progressivist stance emphasized the maintenance of racial separation alongside white elites’ moral and civic interest in the well-being of black residents. This interest generally took the form of a pronounced paternalism, which typically enabled powerful white residents to serve as benefactors to their black neighbors, in a sort of patron-client relationship. “It was white people doing something for blacks—not with them,” explained Charlotte-based Reverend Colemon William Kerry Jr. While often framed as gestures of beneficence and closeness, such acts reproduced inequity and distance. More broadly, this racial order served dominant economic and political interests, as it preserved segregation with a progressive sheen that favored industrial expansion.12

...who was always the first to read the words, and to speak love for them; and my mother and my stepfather, whose unflagging moral, spiritual, and financial support—beyond what I've ever deserved or could repay—has sustained me, and uplifted this work.

Moral elevation" describes the feeling of being uplifted by an act of uncommon goodness. Elevation brings out what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." Even in the face of atrocity, elevation leads us to look at our similarities instead of our differences. We see the potential for good in others and gain hope that we can survive and rebuild. We become inspired to express compassion and battle injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.