Three inspiring stories came to my attention. These stories are remarkable, not because we don’t often hear of them. They are remarkable because of the way people responded to them. The stories have all gone viral.
The first one I heard about was where a blind man drops $20 in a Dairy Queen. A woman picks it up and pockets it. A Dairy Queen employees Joey Prusak, sees the whole thing. After “having words” with the woman, he kicks her out of the store and gives the blind man $20 of his own. Cool.
What’s the quickest way to make $100,000? For Glen James, a homeless Boston man, the secret was turning in a bag with $40,000 in it. In this second story, the homeless man found a bag of cash – about $3,000 – and another $40,000 in traveler’s checks owned by a Chinese student visiting another student here in the US. Hundreds of miles away in Midlothian, Va., Ethan Whittington saw the story online. He set up a page on a crowd funding site where this guy’s good deed raised more than $100,000…in one day for Glen.
The third story is less fantastic, but no more heartwarming. College freshmen football players walk into a store to buy some things. They walk up to the counter and wait for someone to come ring up their purchase. But no one comes. Turns out the store is closed. The lights were left on and the door was left open by mistake. What the freshmen do next is awesome. They leave money on the counter for everything they bought and leave the store exactly how they found it.
Of course, it’s all captured on video surveillance. Why do we love these stories so much?Maybe because it reminds us of how honest and open-hearted human beings can be. These stories reconnect us with what we already know to be true: human beings are good. What makes us go wrong, more often than not, are opportunities in a system that have us behave in disconnected ways. Disconnected from each other and from ourselves.
Contrast that with Copiosis. Copiosis naturally encourages humanity’s best behavior by revealing how connected we all are, how abundant our world is and how every person, from a Dairy Queen Manager, to a homeless man to a group of youths do things that benefit the world around them.
There are no laws in Copiosis. But through its custom-designed Net Benefit framework, Copiosis inspires acts like these stories all the time. Humans know how to do the right thing. All we have to do is give them a society that encourages that, instead of one that pits one human against another for fictitiously scarce resources. That’s what Copiosis offers.
