Pushkin.

If a psychologist ever looks at your life at say your level of emotional maturity or the way you handle daily problems and says that you're well adjusted you'd probably be pretty

pleased I mean nobody wants to be called maladjusted right? Well in 1967 one

speaker at a meeting of the American Psychological Association made the case

for being maladjusted.

There are some things in our society, he said, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. In the face of bigotry,

violence, extreme inequality, and war, feeling good makes no sense. The speech made major waves among psychologists in part because it was not

given by a psychologist but by Martin Luther King Jr. The great civil rights leader

told psychologists that in many cases their focus on happiness was backwards.

When the norms of a culture are unjust, true social health requires what MLK called creative maladjustment.

Creative Maladjustment, he argued, had two parts.

The first was a sense of fury about how things are. We need to be upset in the face of an unfair status quo, but

we should also do so in a creative way. We need to bring a sense of hope that the future

could be different.

I'm Jamil Zaki and in my book Hope for Synics I explore Dr King's idea of creative

maladjustment and find that it is deeply prescient. A lot of evidence from

psychology bears out what he said. Hope isn't a complacent feeling that causes

people to ignore their problems. It's a key ingredient in our ability

to yearn for a better future and to fight for it.

In this special season on Finding Hope,

Jamil and I have shared study after study, showing that we humans are kinder,

less divided, and more cooperative than most people realize.

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