'Invent your own life’s meaning' by Bill Watterson

Delivered by Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes, at Kenyon College in 1990

Context:

I read Calvin and Hobbes religiously as a kid and the strips have grown even more important to me today. Such a rare richness, depth, and provocative beauty to the dialogues and ideas. Bill Watterson was king of comic mountain, publishing his daily strip in over 2000 newspapers globally, when he suddenly retired in 1995 after a Beatles-like ten year run. Since then he’s become known as a recluse so this rare speech he delivered to Kenyon College on May 20th, 1990 stands as a lasting piece of his wisdom. There are so many gems in here that every time I read it, I read it twice. Hope you enjoy.

Speech Transcript:

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon.

In it I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking or where exactly I'm supposed to be going. As I walk up the steps to the post office I realize I don't have my box key and, in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, ‘How many more years until I graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already?? How old AM I?’

Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.

I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember any of yours either.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's ‘Creation of Adam’ from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.

The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.

My friends and I liked the finished painting so much, in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year.

And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any polisci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with three hundred and sixty-five ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running.

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of ‘just getting by’ absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised [how] matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry [prevail?]. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives.

Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one idea leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.

A playful mind is inquisitive and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

So, what's it like in the real world?

Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late.

Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.

Boy, was I smug.

As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.

Watching my career explode on the launchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my first love, comic strips.

For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.

A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the four and a half million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another twenty cents without doing any work for it.

It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.

It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.

Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those polisci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills.

Thoreau said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.

When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-aberations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.

I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.

I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.

Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.

To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a twelve billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I thought about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.

The so-called ‘opportunity’ I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become a committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.

What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least one of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.

With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.

Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed.

I wish you all fulfillment and happiness.

Congratulations on your achievement.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

'A better measure for society" by Robert F. Kennedy

Hey everyone,

Happy fifth of July. I brushed up against many Fourth of July celebrations from American friends yesterday and it reminded me of the Robert F. Kennedy speech given at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968 ... just three months before he was assassinated. It's a long speech — here's the full text from the Kennedy Library — so I'm just highlighting my favorite excerpt below.

Hope it strikes a chord with you as it did with me,

Neil

"A better measure for society" (excerpt from Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968)

Delivered by Robert F. Kennedy | Read full speech on JFKLibrary.org here

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.  Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.  Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

'What does why mean?' by Richard Feynman

Delivered by Richard Feynman

Context:

I first got the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman when I was a kid and found it completely captivating. Much was over my head but that was sort of the thing — I kept getting the vertiginous sensation of learning about things way over my head as they were explained to my simple little brain. This little speech was a response to an old interview question and it shows Feynman’s ability to turn overly simplistic black and white questions into conversations of depth and scale and nuance and — the part that’s most fascinating to me — shows how to carry listeners with you as you go there. I feel like we live in an endlessly-inching-towards-binary-everything world and in that world I think learning to master the skill of pulling up and back is extremely powerful. Let’s listen to a master at work.

Speech:

If you get hold of two magnets and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Now, turn around the other way and then they slam together. Now what is it the feeling between those two magnets?

 What do you mean what's the feeling between the two?

There's something there isn't there. I  mean that the sensation is that there's something there when you push these two magnets together.

Listen to my question. What is the meaning when you say that there's, there's a feeling? Of course you feel it. Now what do you want to know?

What I want to know is what's going on between these two bits, these two bits of metal?

 They just repel each other.

Well then what does that, but, what does that mean or why are they doing that or how are they doing it?

You're asking…

I must say I think it's a perfectly reasonable question.

Of course it's a reasonable — it's an excellent question, okay. But the problem that you're asking — you see when you ask why something happens. How does a person answer why something happens?

For example Aunt Minnie is in a hospital. Why? Because she slipped. She went out and she slipped on the ice and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies. But it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet who knew nothing about things.

At first you understand why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital. How do you get to the hospital with the, when the hip was broken? Well because her husband seeing that she had the hip was broken called the hospital up and sent somebody to get her.

All that is understood by people. Now when you explain a why you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise you're perpetually asking why.

Why did the husband call up the hospital?

Because the husband is interested in his wife's welfare. Not always. Some husbands aren't interested in their wife’s welfare when they're drunk and they're angry and so you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications.

 If you try to follow anything up you go deeper and deeper in various directions. If, for example, you go ‘Why did she slip on the ice?’, well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that. No problem.

But you ask ‘Why is ice slippery?’ That's kind of curious. Ice is extremely slippery. It's very interesting.  You say how does it work?  You could, you see,  you could either say I'm satisfied that you've answered me — ice is slippery. That explains it. Or,  you could go on and say why is it slippery? And then you're involved with something because there aren't many things as slippery as ice. It's very hard to get greasy stuff,  but that's sort of wet and slimy. But a solid that's so slippery, because it is in the case of ice, that when you stand on it they say, momentarily, the pressure melts the ice a little bit so you got a sort of instantaneous water surface on which you're slipping.

Why on ice and not on other things? Because ice expands. Water expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it, is capable of melting it. But other substances contract when they're freezing and when you push them they're just satisfied to be solid.

Why does water expand when it freezes and other substances don't expand when they freeze?

All right.

Have I  answered your question? But I'm telling you how difficult a why question is. You have to know what it is that you're permitted to understand and allow to be understood and known and what it is you're not.

 You'll notice in this example that the more I ask why, it gets interesting afterwards, my idea. The deeper the thing is, the more interesting. And, we could even go further and say why did she fall down when she slipped? That has to do with gravity and involves all the planets and everything else. Never mind it goes on and on.

Now, when you ask for examples why two magnets repel, there are many different levels. It depends on whether you're a student of physics or an ordinary person who doesn't know anything or not. If you're somebody who doesn't know anything at all about it, all I can say is that there's a magnetic force that makes them repel and that you're feeling that force. You say, that's very strange because I don't feel a kind of force like that in other circumstances. When you turn them the other way they attract.

There's a very analogous force, electrical force, which is the same kind of a question and you say that's also very weird. But you're not at all disturbed by the fact that when you put your hand on the chair it pushes you back. But we found out by looking at it that that's the same force as a matter of fact, the electrical force, not magnetic exactly in that case.  But it's the same electrical repulsions that are involved in keeping your finger away from the chair because everything's made out of its electrical forces in minor — in microscopic details. There's other forces involved, but this is connected to electrical forces. 

It turns out that the magnetic and the electric force with which I wish to explain these things, this, this repulsion in the first place, is what ultimately is the deeper thing that we have to start with to explain many other things that looked like they were — everybody would just accept them.

You know you can't put your hand through the chair. That's taken for granted.  But that you can't put your hand through the chair when looked at more closely, why, that involves these same repulsive forces that appear in magnets.

The situation you then have to explain is why in magnets it goes over a bigger distance than ordinarily. And there it has to do with the fact that in iron all the electrons are spinning in the same direction. They all get lined up and they magnify the effect of the force until it's large enough at a distance that you can feel it. But it's a force which is present, all the time and very common and is in a basic force of almost…  I mean I can go a little further back if I were more technical but in an early level I've just got to have to tell you that's going to be one of the things you'll just have to take as an element in the world. The existence of magnetic repulsion, or electrical attraction, magnetic attraction. I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. 

For example if I said the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you because they're not connected by rubber bands. I shouldn't be in trouble. But you’d soon ask me about the nature of the bands and secondly if you were curious enough you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces. Which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly you see.

So I'm not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other, except to tell you that they do. And to tell you that that's one of the elements in the world. There are different kinds of forces. There are electrical forces, magnetic forces, gravitational forces, and others and those are some of the parts.

If you were a student you'd go further. I could go further. I could tell you that the magnetic forces are related to the electrical forces very intimately. That our relationship between the gravity forces and electrical forces remains unknown and so on. But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force, in terms of something else that you're more familiar with because I don't understand it in terms of anything else that you're more familiar with.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

“2020 Screen Actors Guild Acceptance Speech by Brad Pitt”

Delivered by Brad Pitt at the SAG Award Ceremony in 2020

Context:

Brad Pitt won a SAG Award for his role as Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. Here is his memorable acceptance speech.

Speech:

I gotta add this to my Tinder profile.

(laughter)

Thank you my brothers, my sisters. This means so much, um, more than I can possibly fathom. 

I want you to know, I watch everything. I watch you all.  And the work has been mesmerizing. So I thank you. 

I want to thank my co-stars: Leo, Margot Robbie, Margot Robbie's feet, Margaret Qualley's feet, Dakota Fanning's feet. Seriously, Quentin has separated more women from their shoes than the TSA.

[Applause]

Now we all know what we do is a team sport. And we elevate each other. And I got to work with some amazing, amazing people: Mr. Pacino, Mr. Dern, Kurt Russell, Leo, Dakota, um, um...Tim. Wait, ah, ah, where are you guys? Miss Butters. A bunch of the new generation, Margaret Qualley, Austin Butler. Anyway, you all, you all elevated my game. I certainly hope I did the same for you.

Um, let's be honest. It was a difficult part. The guy who gets high, takes his shirt off and doesn't get on with his wife.

(laughter)

It’s a big stretch.

(laughter)

It's big.

[Applause]

Listen, I love our communities. I love our community so much. It's been amazing to me. Each... I've met so many amazing people along the way.  Each of us in this room you know, we know pain, we know loneliness, we bring that to the screen. We know moments of grace, we've had moments of wisdom, we bring that to the screen. We've all had a laugh at our ridiculousness and we know funny and we bring that to the screen. And goddamn, I think that's a worthy endeavor.

[Applause]

I've been banging away at this thing for 30 years. I think, I  think the simple math is some projects work and some don't and there's no reason to belabor either one. Just get on to the next and keep telling stories.

Thank you for this.

[Applause]

My love and respect. 

Enjoy the evening because tomorrow it's back to work.

[Applause]

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

'Why did I say 'yes' to speak here?' by Malcolm Gladwell

Delivered by Malcolm Gladwell at Google Zeitgeist in 2013

Malcolm Gladwell has an incredible ability to keep a giant room full of people pin-drop silent for long periods of time. How does he do it? Does he yell or scream or swear? Does he have flashy slides or dance around the stage? No. None of these things! And yet … he pulls off magic trick after magic trick by distilling complex topics into simple stories and packaging them without pomp into wonderfully acrobatic and accessible ways. This somewhat lesser known speech he gave in 2013 at Google offers great lessons on connecting with an audience, raising interest, and captivating a room. The title is a little misleading as it’s actually about something he calls “Elite Institution Cognitive Disorder” which has a wonderfully simple takeaway along the lines of ‘find small ponds where you can be a big fish.’ Hope you enjoy and, for more of Malcolm, you can check out our 3 Books conversation, listen to Revisionist History, or read Bomber Mafia.

Speech:

It's a real pleasure to be here. 

I’m, I was -- I'm acutely conscious to the fact as I listened, uh, both to our previous speaker, and also the ones before, that everyone has been speaking about very consequential and high-minded things this morning, and I'm not going to do that at all.

Um, in fact, I intend to give what I am sure will be the most solipsistic talk ever at a Google Zeitgeist. I simply want to talk about why on earth I decided to, uh, say yes and come here.

Um, here's the situation.

I'm a writer.

Part of what I do to make my living is I go and give speeches at conferences like this. And I, I get paid, right? As one would. And, um, it's that money that I use to, to make my living.

So how much is Google paying me for this?

Zero.

A company with, what? Fifty billion dollars in the bank and they don't have a dime for poor little old Malcolm. Now, we could talk at length about what this says about Google, but I — that's not what interests me.

What interests me is what that says about me.

Why on earth would I say yes … under such a circumstance?

Why -- you know, I’m busy. My time is really valuable. Why did I fly all the way out here across the country, to give away my intellectual property for free? In fact, it wasn't even free! I had to print out my speech this morning in the Business Center. And, um, this is, uh, this is the bill, it cost me $9.87.

It’s costing me to be here.

(laughter)

Now, you can say that I came here because there are all kinds of interesting people here which is true. But, it’s, and you know I don't mean to cast any aspersions on any of you, but my life is lousy with interesting people. I got more interesting people than I know what to — so, you could say maybe I should have come here, I should come here because I can make contacts that will help me, you know, in the business world.

I'm not in the business world.

I don't need to meet a VC. I work out of my apartment. If I want to renovate my kitchen, I’ll just go to the bank for a loan.

There's no -- it doesn't make any sense, in other words, for me to be here.

So why did I say yes?

Well, the answer is that this conference is run by Google, one of the most prestigious and successful companies in the world. I would not have agreed to speak for free at a Yahoo conference, would I?

(laughter)

So, in other words, my decision to do something that is not in my best interest was caused by my association with an elite institution.

And this is what I want to talk about today.

It’s an argument that I make in my new book David and Goliath, which — in further proof of how baffling my decision was to come here — is not available for sale at this conference.

I like to call this problem Elite Institution Cognitive Disorder or EICD.

And it is simply that elite institutions screw us up in all kinds of ways that we're not always conscious of. And since the theme of this morning's session is "Imagine a Better World," I want to try and imagine what the world would look like if we freed ourselves of the scourge of EICD.

So I am going to give you a couple of examples of EICD in action.

But let me start with the very thorny question of science and math, science and math education in this country. STEM, as we call it. We have a problem in turning out enough science and math [college] graduates, right? In this country. And it’s not for lack of interest, by the way, among high school seniors. Lots and lots and lots of high school seniors want to get science and math degrees, but approximately half of them drop out by the end of their second year.

So we have a persistence problem in science and math education in this country.

So the question is why?

Why do so many kids drop out?

Well, the obvious answer is that science and math are really hard and you need to have a certain level of cognitive ability to master those subjects and we don't have enough smart kids, right?

So, if you, if that's true, if science and math education is a function of -- we should be able to see in the statistics that persistence is a function of your cognitive ability.

So let's take a look.

By the way, this is the first time in my life I have ever used Powerpoint.

This is like a fantastic moment for me.

I feel like I have finally joined the 20th century.

It is really … kind of amazing.

(screen turns on)

Oh, wow.

(laughter)

Okay.

So this is -- I've just chosen Hartwick College as a proxy for American colleges for totally random reasons. Hartwick is a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. What we have [onscreen] here is a distribution of math SAT scores among the people who are intending to major in science and math.

What you can see is that there is quite a wide range of native math ability among the kids entering the freshmen STEM programs at Hartwick.

Right?

So what do we see when we look at who ends up graduating with a STEM degree? What we see is that at Hartwick College, the kids in the top third, the top third SAT scores, end up getting well over half of the STEM degrees and the kids with the bottom scores end up getting very few of the STEM degrees. Those kids over there are dropping out like flies.

This would seem to suggest that our original hypothesis, that persistence is a function of cognitive ability is true. And this would also -- we can also go further. We can say if this hypothesis is true, as we go to more and more selective institutions, we should see a very different pattern of persistence. We should see less kids dropping out because the kids are all smarter.

Right?

So let's go to Harvard.

These numbers are a few years old.

But at Harvard, you can see that the bottom third of math SAT scores among kids doing science and math are equal to the top third at Hartwick. The dumb students at Harvard are as smart as the smart students at Hartwick. So you would think everybody at Harvard should be getting a math and science degree, right? Why would they drop out? Everyone is so smart.

What do we see?

Oh, dear.

What we see is the exact same pattern at Harvard that we saw at Hartwick. The smart kids — the top kids — are getting all the degrees. The kids at the bottom aren't getting any degrees. They are dropping out like flies, right? Even though these kids are brilliant.

Right?

So what's happening?

Well, clearly what we're seeing here is that persistence in science and math is not simply a function of your cognitive ability. It's a function of your relative standing in your class. It is a function of your class rank, right?

Those kids who are really, really brilliant don't get their math degree not because -- not as a function of their IQ but as a function of where they are in their class. And, by the way, if you look at any college you want, you will always see, regardless of the level of cognitive ability among the students, you will always see the same pattern.

The kids who get the science and math degrees are the ones in the top of their class. And the kids in the bottom of their class never do.

So the name given for this phenomenon amongst psychologists is relative deprivation theory. And it describes this exceedingly robust phenomenon which says that as human beings we do not form our self-assessments based on our standing in the world. We form our self-assessments based on our standing in our immediate circle, on those in the same boat as ourselves, right?

So a classic example of relative deprivation theory is which kind of country -- which countries have the highest suicide rates? Happy countries or unhappy countries?

And the answer is happy countries.

If you are morbidly depressed in a country where everyone else is really unhappy, you don't feel that unhappy.

Right?

You are not comparing yourself to the universe -- the whole universe of people out there. No. You are comparing yourself to your neighbors and the kids at school and they are unhappy too, so you’re sort of fine.

But if you are morbidly depressed in a country where everyone is jumping up and down for joy, you are really depressed, right? That is a very, very, very profoundly serious place to be and so, as a result, you get that sad outcome more often.

So what's happening at Harvard then?

The kid in the bottom third of his class at Harvard does not say rationally: “I'm in the 99.99th percentile of all students in the world when it comes to native math ability”, even though that's true. What that kid says is, “That kid over there, Johnny over there, is getting all the answers right and I'm not. I feel like I'm really stupid and I can't handle math so I’m going to drop out, get a Fine Arts degree, move to Brooklyn, work, make $15,000 a year, and break my parents' heart.”, right?

(laughs)

So what is the implication of this?

The implication of this is that if you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard, right?

In fact, we can run the numbers on this.

Mitchell Chang at UCLA recently did the numbers and he says, as a rule of thumb, your odds of graduating — successfully getting a science and math degree — fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers.

So if you’re a kid and you have a choice between Harvard and University of Maryland, and University of Maryland is your safety. University of Maryland has 150 -- on average SAT scores are 150 points lower at Maryland. That means your chance of graduating with a STEM degree from Maryland is 30% higher than it would be at Harvard.

Right?

Now -- so if you choose to go to Harvard and not Maryland, you are taking an enormous gamble. You are essentially saying “This STEM degree,” -- by the way, the most valuable commodity any college graduate could have in today's economy — “I am going to take a 30% gamble in my chances of getting that degree just so I can put Harvard on my resume.”

Is that worth it?

I don't think so. Right?

But how many kids, given a choice between Harvard and Maryland, choose Maryland?

Not that many.

Why?

EICD.

Now, why does EICD persist if it is so plainly irrational?

Well, I think it is because as human beings, we dramatically underestimate the costs of being at the bottom of a hierarchy. 

Let me give you another really remarkable example of this.

This is from a paper that was, just came out from a guy named, two economists, guy named John Connelly and Allie Sundy -- Allie Under, rather. They looked at graduates of PhD programs, economics PhD programs at American universities. And what they were interested in was “What is the publication record of these graduates in the six years after they took an academic position?”

So as you know, the principal way by which we evaluate economists is how often and how well do they publish. So what these guys did is they did a little algorithm, took the top economics journals, and weighted them according to their level of prestige, and came up with a number of how many -- your score after six years of graduation.

So we get this chart here.

What you can see, first of all, look at the 99th percentile. So what this says is, the kids who are in the 99th percentile of their PhD program at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago -- the 99th percentile, that's what they publish.

The Harvard students publish 4.31 journal articles in their first six years after graduation. That's amazing. Right?

Astounding number.

Same with M.I.T at 4.73.

All the way down the list.

What we see here is that the best students at the very best schools are extraordinary, and that comes as no surprise. You just saw Larry Summers here. I don't know where he went. Larry Summers, that's Larry Summers, right?

Brilliant. Genius. We knew that.

Let's look at the 85th percentile.

Now, the 85th percentile at these schools, these are schools that might take two dozen PhD students every year. So if you're in the 85th percentile in the MIT economics program, you're the fifth or sixth best student in your class. That's really smart, okay?

The 85th percent student at MIT -- or at Harvard, let's do Harvard — publishes basically one paper in their first six years versus 4.31 in the top student. So the gap between one and five is enormous, right? It is 5X.

Now, let's go down to the 55th percentile at Harvard. So the 55th percentile at Harvard is the -- let's say, the, uh, 12th best person at the greatest economics program in the world. They could arguably say they are one of the 20-top PhD economic students in the world, right?

Look what their publication rate.

0.07.

Basically they're not publishing at all.

By any standard by which we judge academic economists, these people are complete failures, right?

Now, I've picked lousy schools.

And I've started with Toronto, which is where I went to school. So this is a little masochistic moment where I basically confess to how paltry my academic pedigree is. I have also picked B.U. and then I have also picked -- non-top 30 here is simply all the schools that are so terrible I can't bring myself to name them.

So we've aggregated them all so these are schools that if your child -- anyone in this room, if your child said they were going to go to one of these schools, you would weep, okay?

What do we see here?

What we see here is that the 99th percentile at these lousy schools publish more than everyone at the top schools except for the 99th percentile, right? Do you see that?

Look at Toronto, 3.13. The only people who publish more than the top student at Toronto are the top students at those top seven schools. The top student at Boston is publishing three times more than the 80th percentile student at Harvard.

What does this tell us?

Well, it tells us that -- oh, before I get there -- the guys who did this study, having done the study, were so stunned at what they were seeing that they end their article with this whole thing about what on earth is going on with Harvard?

Here's a school which is collecting the most brilliant, the most accomplished, probably the best-looking graduate students in economics -- I can't imagine the bar is that high -- but, nonetheless, it presumably is a selection criteria. They gather them all together and, yet, everyone, except for the very, very best students, is basically a flop.

And they say, I'm quoting them, “Why is it that the majority of these successful applicants who are winners and did all the right things up to the time they applied to graduate school became so unimpressive after they are trained?”

Are we -- and this is a moment of genuine distress on the part of these two economists -- are we failing the students or are they failing us?

No one's failing anyone!

What you're just seeing is relative deprivation in action, right?

When it comes to confidence and motivation and self-efficacy, the things that really matter when it comes to making your way in the world, relative position matters more than absolute position. The 80th percentile student at Harvard looks at those kids who are smarter than him and says, "I can't do it."

The number one student at Missouri says, "Wow, I am lord of the manor. I am going to go out and conquer the world!"

Right?

So what does it mean?

Well, what it means, what it means first of all, when it comes to hiring, it means you should hire on the basis of class rank. And you should be completely indifferent to the institution attended by the applicant. In fact, we should have a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ policy, for the name of your undergraduate institution.

(laughter)

It's hurting us to know that. Doesn't help us.

And when you hear some institution, some fabulous Wall Street investment bank, some university say, "We only hire from the top schools," you should say, "You moron!"

(laughter)

No, you don't want to hire from only the best schools.

You want to hire from the top students from any school under the sun.

And it also means that when it comes -- if you have kids going to college — when it comes to choosing your undergraduate institution, you should never go to the best institution you get into — never!

Go to your second or your third choice.

Go to the place where you're guaranteed to be in the top part of your class.

So why don't we do that?

Well, why did I come here when it was profoundly in my self-interest not to, right?

Because when we have an opportunity to join elite institutions, we are so enormously flattered and pleased with ourselves that we do things that are irrational.

Thank you.

(Applause)

 

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

'I Believe in Superheroes' by IN-Q

Delivered by IN-Q (Source: Goalcast)

Context:

Do you know IN-Q? He's a National Poetry Slam Champion, award-winning poet, and multi-platinum songwriter. I came across his video "I Believe in Superheroes" and was just mesmerized.

IN-Q's art is such a gift.

Poem:

When I think of superheroes I think of super humans.
I think of Superman, Wolverine and Wonder Woman.
Usually they have a cape, or a mask to hide their face just in case.
They have X-ray vision and super-human strength.
Some can even breathe in outer space.
They fly around a while, but always come back to keep our cities safe.
They’re here to save humanity from itself.
It’s a metaphor for how we look outside ourselves for help, and while the fantasies are fun, I choose to look for me and you.

We don’t need superheroes, we have super powers, too.
It starts with being open to this moment.
If you do then you can own it.
Besides, it will be gone before you know it, so don’t blow it.
You owe it to this second of eternity to show up, embrace the possibilities, and slow up, take a breath, and look around, see the sites, and hear the sounds, feel the ground, notice how the gravity holds you down.

You could be anywhere in the world, and, yet, you’re here.
When you accept that choice as your own, you can begin to overcome your fear.
And real courage is looking in the mirror, it’s deciding what you want to do, then making that appear.
It’s innovating out of thin air, we must be doing something right if we get scared.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t care.
It’s a process to get here to there, here to there.
There is no here or there.
There’s only here.

We’re on the journey and we’re learning, but building muscle means you’re going to feel the burning, so don’t deny it, simplify it, try it.
See if it can work for you, change perspective to get a different view, and don’t forget you got to laugh at the truth, because, sometimes, your sense of humor will be the only thing that can pull you through.
It’s medicine when you can let it in.
An attitude of gratitude will bring a positive spin, so even when the storm clouds block the blue from your sky, you’ll remember that the sun is waiting for you on the other side.

And having fun is something we must decide, from the lows to the highs.
It’s all a part of the ride.
I can throw my hands up.
Or I can hold on for dear life, hold on for dear life, but I’d rather live once than have to go to hell twice.

Compassion is my passion.
Empathy is my gift, but my growth is incremental as my consciousness shifts, so I create from an abyss, turning pain into gold.
I’m an alchemist, an optimist, and an authentic soul.
I believe that life is good, even when it hurts to see.
I believe in superpowers, and I believe in you and me.
I believe in superheroes but I don’t look for them above because they exist inside us all and we save the day with love.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

'68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice ' by Kevin Kelly

Delivered by Kevin Kelly

Context:

I’ve loved Kevin Kelly’s sage advice since reading his 1000 True Fans blog post and hearing him on The Tim Ferriss Show back in 2014. On his 68th birthday he posted a blog post called 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice and he recorded it as a simple speech as well. Below is the transcript of the speech. Kevin owns all copyright on his material.

Speech Transcript:

Hi, I'm Kevin Kelly and recently I turned sixty-eight so I thought I would pull up this rocking chair and sit in it and dispense some unsolicited advice to young people. And that's what I'm about to do.

Here are 68 bits of advice:

1. Learn how to learn from those who disagree with you or even offend you. See if you can find truth in what they believe.

2. Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

3. Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary and it prevents you from trying to make it perfect so you have to make it different. Different is much better.

4. Don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of that same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.

5. Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love, keep asking them “Is there more?” until there is no more.

6. A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can't believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

7. Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

8. Treating a person to a meal never fails and is so easy to do. It's powerful with old friends and it's a great way to make new friends.

9. Don't trust all-purpose glue.

10. Reading to your children regularly will bond you together and will kick-start their imaginations.

11. Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit or debt that's acceptable is debt to acquire something whose value will increase over time — like a house. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them so don't be in debt to losers.

12. Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

13. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.

14. Don't be the smartest person in the room. Hang out with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

15. Rule of three in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they have just said, then again, and then once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.

16. Don't be the best. Be the only.

17. Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they want you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. So go ahead.

18. Don't take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are just like you — occupied, distracted. Try again later. It's amazing how often a second try works.

19. The purpose of the habit is to remove that action from self negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it, you just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth to flossing.

20. Promptness is a sign of respect.

21. When you're young, spend at least six months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent to experience what your worst lifestyle may be. That way, when you have something in the future that you want to risk, you won't be afraid of the worst-case scenario.

22. Trust me: there is no “them”.

23. The more that you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. So to be interesting, be interested.

24. Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving away too much.

25. To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

26. The golden rule will never fail you. It is the foundation of all the other virtues.

27. If you're looking for something in your house and then you finally find it, when you're done with it, don't put it back where you found it, put it back where you first looked for it.

28. Saving money and investing money are good habits. Small amounts of money invested very regularly for many decades without deliberation is one path to wealth.

29. To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibilities for the mistakes that you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It's astounding how powerful this ownership is.

30. Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

31. You can obsess about serving your customers, clients, audiences, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work. But of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you much further.

32. Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful once said ‘99% of success is just showing up.’

33. Separate the process of creation from improving. You can't write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don't select. While you sketch, don't inspect. While you write the first draft, don't reflect. At the start the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.

34. If you're not falling down occasionally, you're just coasting.

35. Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you'll get. Understanding that is the beginning of wisdom.

36. Friends are better than money. Almost anything that money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways, a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

37. This is true: it is hard to cheat an honest man.

38. When an object is lost, 99% of the time it is hiding within arm's reach of where it was last seen. So, search in all possible locations in that radius and you'll find it.

39. You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

40. If you lose or forget to bring a cable and adapter or charger, check with your hotel. Most hotels have a drawer full of cables, adapters, and chargers that others have left behind and probably have the one that you want if you can claim it after you borrow it.

41. Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only affects the hater. So release a grudge as if it was poison.

42. There is no limit on better. Talent is unevenly distributed, but there is no limit on how much we can do with what we start with.

43. Be prepared. When you are 90% done any large project, like a house, a film, an event, an app, the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

44. When you die, you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

45. Before you are old attend as many funerals as you can bear and listen. Nobody talks about the departed's achievements. The only thing people mention is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

46. For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal, by the end of its life.

47. Anything real begins with a fiction of what it could be. Imagination therefore is the most potent force in the universe and a skill you can get better at. It's the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everybody else knows.

48. When crisis and disaster strike, don't waste them. No problems, no progress.

49. On vacation, go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You'll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote and then later you'll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back.

50. When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself, ‘Would I accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow?’ Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.

51. Don't say anything about someone in an email that you would not be comfortable saying to them directly because eventually they will read it.

52. If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss. But if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss.

53. Art is in what you leave out.

54. Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction, but acquiring experiences will.

55. Rule of 7 in research: you can find out almost anything if you're willing to go seven levels. If the first source you ask doesn't know, then you ask them who you should ask next. And so on, down the line. If you're willing to do that to the seventh source, you will almost always get your answer.

56. How to apologize? Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

57. Don't ever respond to a solicitation or proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.

58. When someone is nasty, or rude, or hateful, or mean with you, pretend that they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy towards them which can often soften the conflict.

59. Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.

60. You don't really want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

61. Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things have been done by people doing them for the very first time.

62. A vacation plus a disaster equals an adventure.

63. Buying tools? Start with buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones that you use a lot. If you wind up using something as a tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

64. Learn how to take a twenty minute power nap without embarrassment.

65. Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don't know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is to master something. Anything. Through mastery of one thing you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy and eventually you'll discover where your bliss is.

66. I'm positive that in one hundred years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong. Maybe even embarrassingly wrong. And I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

67. Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don't have to ignore the many problems we create. You have to imagine improving our capacity to solve those problems.

68. The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This would be much easier to do if you embrace this paranoia.

    Thank you for listening and I hope I was helpful.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

'What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?' by Frederick Douglass

Delivered by Frederick Douglass (Source: Black Past)

Context:

The speech below was given July 5, 1882 in Rochester, New York by Frederick Douglass. Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland to become a leading figure in the abolitionist movement. This is a long speech that builds to an incredible boil.

Speech Transcript:

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.

The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say, I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown . Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.

Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.

As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.

The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present ruler.

Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.

These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.

Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.

On the second of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it.

[We] solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be [totally] dissolved.

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history —the very ring—bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day—cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness.

The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime.

The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.

How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!

Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.

Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interests nation’s jubilee.

Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.

I remember also that as a people Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait—perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout —”We have Washington to our father.”—Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones.

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been tom from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be fight and just. But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, their will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to bum their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival. Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming hand-bills headed “Cash for Negroes.” These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.

The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.

In the deep, still darkness of midnight I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror. Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.

Is this the land your Fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the earth whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in?

But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles and ecclesiastics enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, dependent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side, is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, to hear only his accusers!

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe, having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise and cummin” —abridge the fight to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.” But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of die slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, Welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything—in preference to the gospel, as preached by those divines. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation—a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery.

The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared—men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land, have, in utter denial of the authority of Him, by whom the professed to he called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach “that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.”

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend [Rev. R. R. Raymond] on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.

One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in England towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating, and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and restored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high[ly] religious question. It was demanded, in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and Burchells and the Knibbs, were alike famous for their piety, and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead or a hostile position towards that movement.

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic. Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your fathers stooped, basely stooped

To palter with us in a double sense: And keep the word of promise to the ear, But break it to the heart.

And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length – nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour.

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people. I hold that every American citizen has a fight to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this fight, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.

Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion. Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.”

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are, distinctly heard on the other.

The far-off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it.

God speed the year of jubilee The wide world o’er When from their galling chains set free, Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee, And wear the yoke of tyranny Like brutes no more. That year will come, and freedom’s reign, To man his plundered fights again Restore.

God speed the day when human blood Shall cease to flow! In every clime be understood, The claims of human brotherhood, And each return for evil, good, Not blow for blow; That day will come all feuds to end. And change into a faithful friend Each foe.

God speed the hour, the glorious hour, When none on earth Shall exercise a lordly power, Nor in a tyrant’s presence cower; But all to manhood’s stature tower, By equal birth! That hour will com, to each, to all, And from his prison-house, the thrall Go forth.

Until that year, day, hour, arrive, With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive, To break the rod, and rend the gyve, The spoiler of his prey deprive- So witness Heaven! And never from my chosen post, Whate’er the peril or the cost, Be driven.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.

'What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness' by George Saunders

Delivered by George Saunders (Source: The Ladders)

Context:

Back in 2013 author George Saunders was asked to give the Commencement speech to the Class of 2013 at Syracuse University. His resulting speech on kindness is one of my all-time favorites.

Speech Transcript:

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).

And I intend to respect that tradition.

Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

But here’s something I do regret:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”

Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.

And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.

One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.

End of story.

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.

But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

Now, the million-dollar question: What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?

Here’s what I think:

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).

Now, we don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.

So, the second million-dollar question: How might we DO this? How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc?

Well, yes, good question.

Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left.

So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.

Because kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, everything.

One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish — how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever.

Congratulations, by the way.

When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .

And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.

Congratulations, Class of 2013.

I wish you great happiness, all the luck in the world, and a beautiful summer.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Click here to sign up.