Being apart is not being alone, morality at the highest stage drives the few

Some people do not need or seek out the attention or validation of the group. Some people participate in society by what they do for society and not what they show society. They consider society as a whole: a sum of the parts.

Consider Kohlberg' stages of moral development .  Some people attain level / stage six. At this level some people realize that all action in the specific towards one person or family is meaningless in the extremes of time and space.   That person or family may exist for a hundred years but eventually the influence on society and even history fades into nothingness. So why work in temporal matters, why work towards one goal?  This is a hard thing for most people to understand but people at this stage, people with this understanding of morality in the abstract, understand how decisions affect everyone over vast time periods, are not trying to help Steve down the street with his move but help everyone with pivotal problems.  Doing the abstract work gives them no credit or appreciation from Steve or his neighbours. Also none of the back problems.

This level of abstraction is known in many fields, in mathematics, and science and even in art. Did Monet make fifty versions of the same painting, or just one? Logically, if he wanted to make the most money from one painting idea then reproducing it many times is what an average person would do. But what if he, or anyone else like him, thought in the abstract?  To create art that defines a period is a longer lasting mark than selling 50 times as many. This is why people dedicate their lives creating things most people don't understand to care about. It's because those creators understand morality on the highest level of abstraction.

Think on it this way, some people are satisfied if they get up every day and build bridges.  In forty years you can construct maybe hundreds of bridges. But in fifty years, they will all disappear to be replaced with bigger better bridges that carry more with the latest technology.

What if instead you dedicate your life to figuring out the calculus of how to make all bridges stronger and last longer?  Then your work lives on forever.

So who is the nobler man, the doctor that heals one patient or the mathematician that discovers the infection rate of Ebola?  Whose mark is greater?