Energy of Virtue

What this episode covers

Welcome to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. A couple of thousand years ago, a consideration of virtue was part of everyday, common discourse. The Greeks gave considerable attention to virtue, culminating in Aristotle's influential writings on moral and intellectual virtues. Before him, Confucius proposed personal virtue as the way to a good life. The Bible has hundreds of passages about the importance of virtue. Today, public discourse is muted, and people lament the loss of the byproducts of virtue, like falling self-discipline and rising selfishness. Not to mention the rampant corruption at all levels of modern society that makes us fear that virtue is, in fact, long gone. As a small indicator of this, a graph of the frequency of words occurring in books over time shows a rapid rise of the word "technology" in the past 40 years against a two-century slide in virtue. In Norberto Keppe's Integral Psychoanalysis, though, virtue is essential for a healthy human being and society. So we'd like to go against the grain! The Energy of Virtue, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Click here to listen to this episode.