If you've been following along attentively for the last couple of posts, I think you will agree that when we distill things down to their essence, the world around us, reality, really needn't be so complicated. Being a social being, humans should find it rather natural to look out for, share with, and cooperate among a fair-sized network of relationships. What is more, due to the overlapping and interpenetrating nature of these personal networks, we have a lot more in common with a lot more people than we may have originally thought. So what's keeping us back?
This is a question that a lot of people have spent a lot of time researching, contemplating, and working on. It's simply difficult to find the answer, the one, single answer, the answer that will satisfy everyone. Some think it is because we are sinful by nature (the Western religious answer), others that we cannot resist and are overwhelmed by our desires (the Eastern religious answer), still others because we want to ensure the survival of our own genes (a biological answer), or that our self-interest is more important than cooperating with others, unless it serves that interest of course (an economic answer). These aren't all the answers, naturally, but they're the ones we most often hear (in one form or another), but all of them, believe it or not, do have something in common: they are based on the assumption that there is something wrong with us: we either suffer from some innate weakness or are somehow helpless in the face of some selfish force.
Doesn't that strike you as odd? It does me. Why should our most fundamental assumption about our nature be that there is something wrong with us, and most notably something against which we stand little chance of prevailing? And, if you ask me, I think I also know why this is our first avenue of approach at an answer: it gets us off the hook. Yep, we don't have to really do anything, because, well, how do you go against your nature, how to you overcome nature, if we're programmed a certain way, what could any of us do about it?
Truth be told, in the end, it is only up to us. We're the only ones who can do anything about anything. At the very core of our nature, we see that since we can ask questions, we should; and since togetherness, social interaction and cooperation are existentially fundamental to our being, we should be including others in our thoughts as well.
No, we didn't ask for the job, nature simply gave it to us. In my view, it is simply time that we owned up to the fact and started taking the job seriously. And the precepts that help us do just that are the ones our recent Birthday Boy made us so aware of: love your neighbor as yourself and don't do anything to anyone else that you wouldn't want them to do to you. Again, how hard can that be?
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