When will we feel that others are as important as ourselves?
Question from the Internet:
“Does anybody feel that the well-being of our peoples and world is more important than themselves or their friends and family, and dedicate themselves to improving it above all else?”
We cannot feel this by default. Inherently, we are all 100% self-focused, self-serving, self-justifying, egocentric, and individualistic. It does not matter what we claim; it does not matter if we are honestly unaware of the desires and intentions that drive us.
As unique, empirical natural scientists — who have been studying and describing human nature for millennia — explain, we can make calculations and decisions only for our own sake. Moreover, most of the time, we are surviving and succeeding at each other’s expense.
This is the “template” human history with its helplessly recurring vicious cycles is based on, and this is why our “modern and developed” human society is fast approaching self-destruction.
It is true that we should feel that the well-being and optimal state of others are at least as important as our own well-being and optimal state. But in order to actually come to such a sensation, we need to go through conscious and purposeful self-development.
Through this self-development, we will need to come to a very clear understanding and to a visceral sensation that we are all totally and irrevocably interconnected and interdependent. We will need to understand that our personal lives, health, safety, and survival depend on and are completely intertwined with the life, health, safety, and survival of the whole.
Only when we have already understood this, and we come to a very real, tangible, and truly “visceral” sensation that we are all but individual cells of the same living organism, only then will we view others at least as important, worthy, and dear to us as ourselves.