WATER OF LIFE

“There is a profound disrespect for human beings in modern life. Business encourages us to think of ourselves as human capital. Advertising appeals to our fears and insecurities to try to get us to buy products we do not need. Too many religious institutions teach people to be good but do not help them to know who they are. Too many psychologists see their jobs as helping people learn to accommodate to what is, not to take their journeys and find out what could be”—Pearson, Awakening the Heroes Within.

Recently, I watched the movie The Girl in the Cafe. The girl says, “A lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, too. It stopped you seeing the heart of things.” The point of the movie is that leaders (at the G8 conference) should make deals on trade and economic issues but when it comes to humanitarian issues—where it’s a matter of people living or dying—there should be no compromises.

Understanding and rewarding the gifts of every personality type and culture type is the solution to global inequality: reward individual and cultural differences instead of penalizing them; end capitalist exploitation of individual gifts; and end corporate theft of international resources and global economies.

INFPs with a strong preference for the empathy facet (like myself) resonate with Hofstede’s feminine values dimension—especially the concern for inequality (income, gender, homeless, etc.) Also, according to Pearson, this empathic power comes from the orphan archetype. Archetypes, both individual and cultural, like personality types, have unique gifts to offer.

At the end of my book, Where in the World Do I Belong??, I compare culture types to Hofstede’s dimensions and Pearson’s archetypes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Personality type, Culture, Culture Types, Inequality, Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.