Lawyers are the leaders who defend society’s light. Like artists, lawyers must “dream the culture forward.” The responsibility to understand and improve lawyers’ brain health and mental strength extends to our communities because of the privilege, power, and prestige we enjoy. The neuro-intelligent lawyer and legal organization can enlighten government, business, media, education, and philanthropic entities. Like Seth Godin’s insight in The Song of Significance that work is not working for many employees, society isn’t working for many people. Social structures that feature fear, scarcity, exclusion, steep hierarchy, and extreme competition are dehumanizing. And humans are suffering. Maverick lawyer leaders must first dream, and then act, to move the culture forward. They must make neuro-intelligence available to all people, so they can experience the full range of their identities and capabilities. We cannot afford to exclude and lose humans and the light they could bring to the world. These lawyer leaders must educate us about the toxicity of extreme competition and cultures built on fear, scarcity, and chronic stress. These Mavericks can lead the social moonshot movement to further heal and humanize society.

This chapter illustrates the power of the animal story to challenge anthropocentric positions and ideas of human exceptionalism. It centres upon the famous story of Androclus and the lion (as told by Gellius and other ancient and modern authors) to show that anthropomorphizing is not merely a tool of human appropriation of the animal; it can also bring out real sympathies and correspondences between human and non-human creatures. With its particular focus on the capacity to experience pain as a shared feature of humans and animals, the story driving this chapter anticipates modern attempts to bring questions of sentience and suffering into the picture and to reimagine justice as extending beyond the human.