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Sage Advice on Being a “Good Citizen” in a Complex World
We learn citizenship skills at a young age, for better or worse.
Key points
- Being a “good citizen” means being engaged.
- Citizenship is especially important in today’s fragmented world of shifting values.
- People learn to be good citizens in their families, during their upbringing.
- Working well as an individual requires us to understand how larger groups of people function and dysfunction.
I recently read Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders, and Citizens, by Edward R. Shapiro, M.D.. With so much worth sharing, I reached out to Dr. Shapiro, who kindly agreed to let me interview him.
Among many other accomplishments, Dr. Shapiro is former medical director and CEO of the Austen Riggs Center, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center. He is a principal in the Boswell Group of New York, a founder of the International Dialogue Initiative, and on the Advisory Board of Partners Confronting Collective Atrocities. He is a distinguished faculty member at the Erikson Institute for Education, Research and Advocacy. He has published three books and over 50 articles and book chapters on human…
