This morning, I began reading a compelling new book by Michael Lewis called The Undoing Project,  and it is about the groundbreaking collaboration of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose studies undid many assumptions about human decision-making and changed the way we think about thinking, from economics to psychology to sports.

One of the passages that already caught my eye was about generosity.

The psychologists defined generosity as a contagion. When people are generous, the people around them often become generous, when people are stingy and mean-spirited, the people around them often become stingy and mean-spirited. Just look at our political system.

Kahneman and Tversky, writes Lewis, are more responsible than anyone for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

I’ll share the ideas in the book as I read it, but I was struck by the ideas I came across about generosity and compassion

If you wish to be generous yourself, say, Kahneman and Tversky, then surround yourself with generous people. If you wish to be compassionate, surround yourself with compassionate people.

Good, like evil, can be transmitted to others. So can anger and fear. I have seen this idea played out again and again through my blog, where viral generosity has raised nearly $200,000 for people in need in the past year or so.

Many people are wringing their hands about the state of things, I believe we are on the verge of a Compassion Revolution. It is already beginning – the massive outpouring of support for the Native-Americans at Standing Work, the forthcoming Women’s March On Washington,  the great circle of compassion and protection forming around refugees suddenly terrified for their own lives and futures in America, the rapidly spreading movement to help people who may lose their health care.

Some see this conflict as a political one, between the “left” and the “right,” but I see it different as a conflict of the spirit, between the angry and the hopeful, the compassionate versus the aggrieved, the generous versus the greedy and the stingy, the pessimistic against the hopeful

Gandhi and King and Mandela showed the world how to fight for compassion, they are good models to follow. There is nothing more powerful than an army of compassionate people willing to stand up for others, and that opportunity will come shortly, and is, perhaps, already here.

I see a compassion contagion sweeping the country and taking hold. When I sought help on the blog in buying 300 Welcome Bags for  arriving refugee children,  hundreds of people sent twice as much money as was originally sought. When I mentioned people writing to the residents of the Mansion Assisted Care facility,  hundreds of people responded instantly with cards, messages, gifts, crafts, caftans and mittens and scarves.

I have signed up as a voluntary to help mentor refugee families arriving shortly in America. The revolution is on. Challenge, even suffering, is what defines us, and gives us the gift of grace. Without suffering, we all will go back to sleep and dream fruitlessly of a perfect world.

If truth is a revolutionary act, so is compassion, just look at the news. For me, this is one of the most powerful, and revolutionary, movements in the world. I’m in.