Humility is Greater Than Hope

I live in a part of the world that has a mad, mad, mad fixation on success, especially unsustainable success but generally a preoccupation with being successful.  My part of the world consumes 25% of global resources and in political moments it talks about hope.  If people don't have hope consuming that much resource then what of the parts of the world whose nations are plundered to enable that consumption? 

There are pockets of dangerous areas to live in my part of the world, but they don't come close to the atrocity filled landscape of a place like Congo.

We already know that empathy is something we sugar-coat as our society's support of emotional intelligence. Peter Salovey, Ph.D and John Mayer, Ph.D came up with the term emotional intelligence way back in 1990.  Five years later Daniel Goldman became famous with his best selling book of the same name and Goldman got associated with EQ.  How many people in Congo did that save then, and how many has is saved today.  It is not that my part of the world is not empathetic enough, my part of the world is not humble enough.  That was clear enough to see in the famous picture of the starving child and the vulture.

Humility must then be greater than hope, so long as it does not drag our lives into humiliation or a sudden consciousness of action that then may have haunted a Kevin Carter, enough to not bother about this "personal brand" and more about not being able to live with himself for being that brand.  Humility should not lead us to our death, it should lead us to our humanity.  Decades later we still respond to pictures like the one above.  Those of us who live in my part of the world continue to write about happiness and hope as if these are huge missing holes in what Phil Collins calls "Another Day in Paradise" - and in comparison to Congo it really is. 

Even if my own humility has been tested, it can never reach the depths and lows of those parts of the world that are exploited and serve only to provide us product.  Cheaper product so we can have a happier and more hope filled life courtesy of a behemoth retailer.  Great brands should be great product, so there is nothing wrong with the brand promise of a product, what is wrong is how lacking we may be in humility so that we don't take into account the backstory of where that product may have come and who may have been used to bring us affordable consumerism. 

Today the people who live in the area of India and China want what my part of the world wanted and it wants it more because there 4x the number of people who want that, and they don't need the West to give them a lecture about finding humility.  China in particular is doing its utmost to lock up key resources so that it can continue and accelerate what was once the providence of the West.