“The caring person is the carrier of radical middle politics. … To see this clearly, it helps to look at three competing archetypes of the Good American. … Self-aggrandizers are ambitious strivers. They get their primary identity from their occupation and the social status associated with that. … Self-sacrificing individuals are not personally ambitious – and when they are they try to hide it. They get their primary identity from their ethnic, racial, or religious affiliation or sexual orientation. … Caring persons may or may not be personally ambitious, but they want their jobs to provide them with opportunities for personal growth and social relevance. They get their primary identity from the lifestyle choices they make and the values they consciously choose. They are equally committed to personal freedom and social justice, self-development and social change.”

—  Mark Satin

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 2, "The Caring Person," pp. 17–18.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The caring person is the carrier of radical middle politics. … To see this clearly, it helps to look at three competing…" by Mark Satin?
Mark Satin photo
Mark Satin 45
American political theorist, author, and newsletter publish… 1946

Related quotes

Newton Lee photo
Peter Sloterdijk photo
Pope John Paul II photo

“It is helpful to recall that the death of the person is a single event, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary and integrated whole that is the personal self. The death of the person, understood in this primary sense, is an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Human experience shows that once death occurs certain biological signs inevitably follow, which medicine has learnt to recognize with increasing precision. In this sense, the "criteria" for ascertaining death used by medicine today should not be understood as the technical-scientific determination of the exact moment of a person's death, but as a scientifically secure means of identifying the biological signs that a person has indeed died.
Address to the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society, 29 August 2000

William Saroyan photo

“A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

"The Armenian and the Armenian".
Inhale and Exhale (1936)

“There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it’s not there—I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it.”

Rachel Cusk (1967) British writer

On abandoning being a memoirist in “Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel in the New Yorker (Aug 2017)

Mike Rosen photo
Derek Parfit photo

Related topics