Aristotle argued that an individual cannot achieve happiness without self-direction. If we believe that a just society is one in which people have the opportunity and freedom to become their best selves, then we shouldn’t tolerate the soft tyranny that millions of employees face each day at work—what oral historian Studs Terkel called “a Monday through Friday kind of dying.

... the final chapter delineates the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ as a dignified mode of human relating that is based on acts of deep empathy. It describes how this ancient philosophy - that we treat others as we wish to be treated and that we do not treat them as we do not wish to be treated - emerged all over the world as a result of the rampant structural violence unleashed by the rise of agrarian societies.

The wish for recovery, in other words, is not the same as the will to be analysed: among other things, psychological mindedness means working with the idea of an increase in self-knowledge generating relief from psychic pain. Similarly, in the much more formidable case of a nation on the couch, the prospect of psycho-social improvement begins with an act of faith - specifically, faith in the value of understanding. I am referring to a process of understanding that begins in the unlikeliest places: to understand where it all went wrong for human beings - not just South Africans - we have to go back to the start of civilisation, the start of violence, and the start of deep compassion.

Then there is the pantheism characteristic of Native American religion, with its belief in an immanent god that cannot be separated from reality as we know it. The point, however, is this: the universality of the Golden Rule did not come about because all was right in the world of humans.

Golden Rule thinking is exactly that: it, too, encourages us, through empathetic acts of imagination, to recognise in others the humanity in which we all unarguably share.