Volume 5 · The Great Indian Bazaar · Essay 70

Emotional Vaccination

There are ideas that shout. Emotional Vaccination is not one of them. It waits quietly until the day you need it.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.

At the polling booth, the queue is the one place the CEO and the driver stand at the same height. Whatever else one says about it, that hour is a small miracle of design.

Society is a long conversation; the only question is whether you are listening or merely waiting to speak. The idea has done its job if, the next time it happens to you, you smile before you react.