The most important social principle

Question from the Internet:

“What is the most important social principle?”

The most important “social principle” is what we have been saying and writing for millennia and we never actually got to use it: “Love another as yourself”.

We never got to use this principle since we can’t comprehend it, such a concept is against our inherent nature on multiple counts.

First of all, we do not actually know what “true love” means. We keep talking, singing, and dreaming about “love”, we write poems, songs, and movies about this concept. But what we consider “love” has nothing to do with “true love”.

“True love” is a natural concept, something life is based on. “True love” means that the “lover” stops existing for oneself, instead the “lover” exist within the desires and needs of the “beloved” and the “lover” exists only to completely and perfectly fulfill those desires and needs of the “beloved”, according to the viewpoint of the “beloved”, without any egocentric or subjective bias from the part of the “lover”.

If the cells of our own biological bodies did not exist and act based on this principle, for example, we could not exist even for a moment.

Our “love” is totally egocentric and selfish, we love something and somebody that can give us pleasure and a good reward. If I do not benefit from “love”, I simply cannot love anymore. Even the “mother’s love” is based on ‘selfish” principles, since the mother feels her offspring as a part of herself, as it is arranged by nature to safeguard the continuation of life.

Thus by default, we love and serve only ourselves, and we do that most of the time at the expense of others.

So how and even more importantly why should we follow the principle of “love another as yourself”?

We have to do so because we are not independent and standalone beings as we believe. We do not have individual freedom or even individual rights to ourselves.

We are all but individual cells of the same, closed, single, fully integrated, and interdependent system — within humanity and through humanity within nature.

Thus when I need to learn and practice how to love and serve “others” as I inherently love and serve myself, I am not actually loving and serving “others”. I start to love and serve the parts of my own being. My “self” is not really who and how I feel myself right now. What I feel as my “self” is simply a single part or cell of my “true self”, which encompasses the whole of humanity and through it the whole natural system.

Thus when I learn how to love “others as I love myself”, I actually learn how to love and serve many “true selves”.

For this, we need a unique, purposeful, and practical method, that can not only teach but can also make us tangibly and viscerally feel how interdependent and inevitable, and irrevocably integrated we all are. And then, from this realistic, tangible, and visceral sensation of unity and mutuality, true love will be born.