Can governments look after individuals?

Zsolt Hermann
2 min readDec 18, 2022

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Question from the Internet:

“How effectively should the government be involved in caring for the individuals in their country?”

I think that history and the present state of human society give you the answer. Governments cannot effectively care for each and every individual, even if their intentions are good and they try everything they can with everything they have at their disposal.

We can’t care for each other “top-down” or by establishing laws and forcing people to care for each other.

True care and general well-being are possible only in a society that is built on absolute mutual responsibility and mutual guarantee, where each and every individual cares for and supports others the same way as they instinctively care for and support themselves.

And this is against our inherent nature since inherently, we care for and love only ourselves; moreover, most of the time, we survive and succeed at each other’s expense. This is why we need oppressive and arbitrary laws to try to make society work and survive. This is why many think that the government should look after people while everybody could continue serving only themselves.

So we need a unique, purposeful, and highly practical educational method or science that can help us understand and actually “viscerally” feel how much we are mutually integrated and how much our individual lives depend on the life of the collective.

Only through such irrevocable and undoubted, visceral feeling can we not only yield and start looking after others as for ourselves, but we actually willingly and happily do so, since we do not feel those “others” alien to us anymore, but we feel them as our own, integral parts.

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Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.