Does the Desire to Be Kind Make a Person Strong?
First presented in a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York City.

I once thought kindness and strength had nothing to do with each other. I wanted to be kind when, in high school, I joined a program to teach poor children in Ft. Lauderdale to read. But I felt to be strong you had to look out for yourself, beat out other people, get what you could from them. To a large degree, that was my motive with people, and it made me selfish and unhappy.

In his Definitions and Comment: Being a Description of the World, Eli Siegel defines kindness as "that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased."

To please a person rightly, I learned, doesn't mean doing "nice" things—it means using our keen, critical mind to have that person be in the best relation to the world. Aesthetic Realism shows with solid logic that true kindness is strength because it is equivalent to a human being's deepest desire: honestly to like the world. Learning this changed my life.

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