The rationality of the satisficing outcome is in providing a platform for future decisions—based upon participants’ newly calibrated inventories of satisfaction versus sacrifice.

At the level of individual behavior, we all learn to satisfice as well. A recent article by Michael Parsons in The Irish Times articulated the toughly virtuous Churchillian satsficings of the British during WW II: “dig for victory, stiff upper lip, crying is for housemaids, must carry on, fight them on the beaches.”

Yet, reflecting, I find myself wondering about the soft virtues of satisficing that we generally ignore. Indeed, not to partake of such virtues is to act utterly irrationally, in contradiction to Simon and the principle, itself. Why not ‘take” what is freely given/gettable to all? Yet, our lockstep notion of satisficing privileges sacrifice in the service of the adequate outcome– without enough (selfish?) emphasis on the freely given and taken, when sacrifice is unnecessary. The banner example is kindness.

I wonder about the self-destructiveness of such behavior. True, pleasure is personally gratifying, and so, possibly sinful. Why risk it, even given our socialization in cultures of pleasurable excess? Behavioral economists suggest to us that we’d prefer to limit the downside of risk (or pain) rather than to maximize potential benefit. But why write down the pleasures of kindness, as Adam Phillips has aptly suggested we do, as weakness when it provides costless pleasure; but for the conscious realization that we enjoy mutuality and reciprocity, and that a productive sense of contentment is not the function of a “stiff upper lip?”

Kindness, it seems, freely given and taken, disrupts the notion that pleasure or satisfaction, must come with personal sacrifice. It might work for organizational decisions, but it certainly disrupts the potential joys of relating to others!

The harsh formula of winner-loser is clear: this is no tv game show proclaiming, you are the weakest link: it is real: savings halved. Job gone. Obligations mounting in the broken strategies of once-sound household finance.

It could be us. It could be me. It is, in fact. We, I, can do nothing (but wait for Obama, Godot , and the Second Coming). We, I, have practiced “nothing doing” for years on the homeless, why not our fallen neighbors? Turn away.

Yes, they’ve see it. We do too: narrowing our eyes, so that the squint clarifies our bounded horizons. We are all vulnerable. We are all afraid. We too are determined by our markets, though we believe our determinations to be granted by higher gifts—our intelligence, charm, wisdom….

Adam Phillips has written a marvelous essay on kindness, published in the Guardian. Kindness has fallen on hard times. Its been reduced to a squinty eyed calculus of “what’s in it for me” – either as the condescending benefactor or the needy recipient. As a human quality, it has fallen into the cook-pot of narcissism: a reflection of winning or losing.

But looking closer, we see that narcissism of the self-serving kind become possible only after the primary narcissism of the self-preservative kind. Adam Phillips, citing Donald Winnicott, reminds us that the giving and taking of kindnesses— the kindnesses of mutual interdependency rather than our cynical reductions of kindness to the absence and presence of power— are what make us human.

However fearful, exhausted, despairing, both the accepting and extending of kindness remain very human and very necessary capabilities. Especially now.