"The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his," - Hugo St. Victor, 12th Century.
It's interesting that we would associate a practiced distance from the accidental properties of ourselves with strength, wisdom--even perfection. I think it's the right way to think about it. I don't know of any kind of wisdom that doesn't start with self-awareness, and self-awareness, I think, is the practice of distancing yourself from yourself, viewing yourself through the eyes of others. What starts as empathy leads inexorably to a kind of universalist outlook, that recognizes that the accidental differences between us are arbitrary and capricious, and so we shouldn't pay them too much heed. Indeed, according to this Hugo fellow, the perfect man shuns them entirely.
But ultimately, all of this relies on exercising the empathy muscle, and this exercise is exhausting. The brain labors to carry out all the psychic computations needed to translate the world into the viewpoint of someone else--and so, just like any kind of grueling task that is good for us, we tend not to carry it out nearly as often as we should. To do it regularly and as an ever-present feature of your thought process is like running a mental marathon. It's so much easier to relax into the cushy couch of our baser tribal tendencies, saying "fuck you" to the out-group while we congratulate each other on having been born in the United States.
That's where the idea, specifically, of strength comes in, I think: you exercise the muscle regularly, and it becomes strong.
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