Good Works As True Wealth

The improvement of society can be achieved only by the moral improvement of individuals.  We live in an epoch of discipline, culture, and civilization but not in an epoch of morality.

In the present state, we can say that the happiness of the people grows, and yet the unhappiness of the people increases as well. How can we make people happy when they are not educated to have high morals? They do not become wise.

Immanuel Kant Cited in the Calendar of Wisdom

Following on the themes of compassion and morality, the renowned philosopher Imannuel Kant points to his culture and to his times as ones that emphasized discipline, culture and civilization,

Writing as he did, in the 1800’s, I wonder how aghast and dismayed he would be if he were transported to our world and times? It appears as if the only values curriculum we teach or care to model is consumerism, media adoration, and self-serving motives for power and fame! 

From my perspective, as long as we permit the lop-sided class structure and promote the economic windfalls of the 1-5% as being somehow important to the well being of the whole society, we will surely increase our unhappiness to epidemic proportions!

While Kant is well known for his moral laws, and his insistence on following a moral path, it appears that in our society today we follow a morality of convenience, and a kind of push/pull about judging others behaviors and deciding to ether affirm them or cancel them; without giving any spiritual or ethical frame of reference for evaluating the importance or the lasting impact of those actions!

Short of overhauling our whole education system, short of making our Media empires less of a “Vast wasteland”, and short of expecting every person in leadership to be a humble and ethically aware as  a compassionate person, I am unsure what our collective fate might be…