How to Own Your Weakness: Alan Watts on the Confucian Concept of Jen and the Dangers of Self-Righteousness

“Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.”

A great tragedy of our time, this epoch of self-righteousness, is the zeal with which people would rather feel right than understand — the situation, the context, the motives and vulnerabilities behind the actions, the basic fact of the other.

Growling beneath it all is an aversion to our own imperfections — we would rather look away and toward the faults of other...