What it is, what its absence does, and why it matters more than we admit

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What We Mean When We Say Dignity

There’s a word that's often used but rarely understood. Dignity. It’s invoked in courtrooms and constitutions, in eulogies and HR policies.

And yet, when it is stripped away from a person, truly, deliberately insulted, what remains is something that no policy document has ever prepared us for.

The UN Declaration of Human Rights opens with it.

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

First sentence. Before freedom of speech, before the right to life, before anything else.

The architects of that document, written in the shadow of the Holocaust, understood something that we, in our comfortable lives, have mostly been spared from learning the hard way: that you can take almost everything from a person and they will find a way to endure.…