One Simple Step to Saving the World

Months ago I wrote about how the cruelty of the world terrifies me—how greed wins out over kindness with alarming frequency, how people villainize one another to avoid addressing our problems ourselves, and how this in turn creates harmful rifts within society.  I still fear that all progress is superficial, and that the core problems remain unchanged.  Instead of racial rifts, we villainize the police.  Instead of taking real efforts to heal economic disparity, we villainize Walmart.  We hide under the blanket of these illusions of Big Bads, convinced that the problem is somewhere else in the world, somewhere out there, not among us, not within us, and not to be solved by us.

One of my friends recently echoed my sentiments when he told of how, when delivering food, his customer overpaid.   He returned the excess money without hesitation, but his coworkers celebrated the act as an anomalous kindness, noting that they themselves would probably not do likewise.  Although trivial when considered as an individual act, it's the compounding of the many of these acts—right or wrong—that occur throughout the day and throughout the world from which greater goods and evils arise.  Moreover, it's the failure to perceive the humanity of the person that is wronged which echoes through all evils.

Often people read or hear my words and end up asking, “what, then, should I do?”  People are looking for a simple “To do” list or Ten Commandments to check off progress in their free time and feel good about themselves.  There is a simple answer, but it’s necessarily ongoing, unceasing.  There is no one thing—or even a list of things—we can get over with and call the world saved.  Sure, there is a list of what needs done: education reform to focus on utilization of information instead of retention, economic reform to oppose the ever-growing economic disparity, social equality regardless of race, sex, orientation, or religion, environmental reform to ensure our survival, and this list is just the beginning.

Yet the simple answer that all this stems from is this: love.  Love unquestioningly.  Love unceasingly.  Love those you might not think deserve it.  Love in action, not only in word.  Keep striving to love more.  It sounds too simple, but the problems in society are easily traced to just as simple of causes.  Economic disparity arises from simple greed, but if we distributed wealth to facilitate cooperation and community instead of competitively hoarding it, we would not only see the decrease in poverty, but we would in turn facilitate technological and cultural progress.  Similarly, social inequality arises from these rifts we create by villainizing each side, combating each other instead of banding together to overcome ignorance and misunderstanding.  Yet efforts through love to create universal community would in turn create universal equality.  If it seems too simple, then reference how, as I pointed out before, just as it only takes the combined spark of a multitude of tiny ice crystals to conjure a lightning storm, change can come from something simple if there’s enough of it.

A number of years ago, prompted by my tendency to describe love as a series of neurochemical imbalances, a friend asked me to actually define love, in a broad, platonic sense, without resorting to snark.  I failed to immediately come up with an answer, but eventually I concluded that love at its purest is selflessness—putting someone else before oneself.  Although I haven’t changed my definition, I have expanded upon it.  As I’ve realized that selflessness gives rise to emergent patterns, creating communities capable of so much more than disjointed collections of individuals, love becomes more than an interaction between two people, or one person’s consideration of another.  Love finds a curious life unto itself in the same way the complexity of our consciousness rises from the interaction of neurons which seem completely unrelated yet nevertheless underlie its mechanisms.  Love becomes about not just a couple separate individuals, but something that grows beyond them while simultaneously improving them with it.

So, go forth and love.  Help others to love.  Maybe enough of us can come together to conjure a storm and make a difference.