The story I tell is that my life turned a corner when I began to listen to and for feelings, to pay attention to the interior worlds of the people I interact with, when I began to value relationships. The corner I have turned is from idealism to realism.
I thought I understood right and wrong. I thought I could coach us back from cruelty, genocide and ecocide, to a stable, sustainable way of being together on this planet. But my vision is just my vision, and at that, only a vision for humanity.
In my teenage years I was approached, as nearly everyone is, by those who keep faith with a God and wish for a heaven on Earth. I would say to them "Your wish for a perfect world cannot happen because you will never convince everyone of your plan.". I was thinking of myself – I knew they would and could never convince me. "If you want a better world, your plan must accommodate many different world views." That was my aspiration – a plan that would accommodate every different point of view.
So the question on which I meditated was, "on what can we all agree?".
The framing of course controlled the answer. I was seeking a vision for how to live peacefully and sustainably in the world. The very least that is necessary for peace is that we respect each other's bodies, autonomy, safety. I saw that for me to be safe, I had to promise to everyone else that they would also be safe from me. I would hurt no one. For this premise to hold did not require everyone to join, but the degree of not joining would be the degree of unsafety.
The world we live in teaches me that there are many, perhaps half of humanity, unwilling to accept this premise. "Your gain is my loss, and I will hurt you to get what I need."
So I despair of enlisting a groundswell of humanity in the belief that we must keep each other safe. I despair of enlisting humanity in the ideal that we must take care of each other, that only by sharing, across group boundaries, ideologies, national boundaries, do we minimize misery and maximize the quality of life, that the resources of our abundant planet can support all of life, if we are willing to share.
But we must be willing to take the least we need, and not take the maximum we can get. Our lives must be about living, and sharing, and ensuring that others have what they need, not about getting and hoarding. And yet, Me-ism is what we are taught in economics and in culture, and I do not know how to appeal to the great mass of humanity that accepts this vision for living. And thus we careen toward Gaia-cide.
There is a deeper problem. Who am I to tell anyone else how to live in the world? Each other person who is trying to survive will make choices to suit them, and who am I to challenge their logic? Would that not be the harm I am counseling against? That any person ought to resist the leading of their inner guidance?
So if there is a principle, the principle of the zero sum, to which we all forced to turn, it is not a principle with which we all agree. Me-ism is the great default strategy, to which we are all forced to turn because everyone else is using it, while sharing is a fragile ethos, easily damaged by defectors to me-ism.
I remember, of course, that I am humanity. That every feeling I have felt has been felt by another human being. That every feeling that has been felt by another human being I can also feel. I also engage in me-ism, because at the margin, I need to succeed and survive. I embrace all that is human, even its mean, repugnant, hateful parts. I understand these choices that other people make. And I despair in them.
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