Why compassion fails

You can't cure fear with compassion

Fear of the other is natural, inevitable, almost forgivable, and that's why you need courage in order to come together.

This sort of sarcasm is a little bit cheap and easy in some ways because it affirms nothing, it really risks nothing. And so I wanted to attempt a little bit more.

[These posters] provoked a creative tsunami of people reacting to it, making it their own, redesigning it, and it's something I couldn't anticipate.

If you'd like to get along with people who are fundamentally different to you, I think you need to find things to motivate them in particular.

These days identity has become a substitute for what used to be personality.

[This project worked] by directing [the focus] away from the other as the object of fear and placing it upon our values.

What these [images] suggest is that it's easy to be compassionate when you are powerful and not under threat. And that's when you really need to be compassionate the most.

Compassion can do some really great things but it can't cure fear.

Maybe the people who disagree with you strongly are not stupid, ignorant or evil...Maybe they have a fundamentally different temperament.

Nuances that are good artistically get squeezed out of political messaging.

I wanted to try something after this which was singular and clear and still had some sort of an ironic twist so it would cut both ways.

The human species needs the entire spectrum of personalities because they all have different skill sets, different ways of solving problems.

I started by admitting that I am not a very compassionate person but that's not exactly an impediment. I just need different reasons for doing the right thing.