Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is today’s society being consumed by hatred more than love?“
The fact that there are masses of needy, sick and poor people is a sign that love is indeed lacking in today’s society.
It is normal to think that governments and various organizations should take care of people in need. The problem is that we might be ready to contribute some money and time to help out, but we fall short of giving all of our heart in such contributions.
Our heart, which is made up of self-serving desires, prioritizes our own needs over the needs of others, and no matter how much we invest into providing for others, by nature we lack a sincere and complete concern for them.
Our world is thus full of poverty and disease. As long as our heart prefers self-benefit over benefiting others, then no matter how much we contribute to the well-being of others, there will always be masses of people with unmet needs.
Therefore, instead of acting out of genuine love and care for others, any contribution we make seemingly toward society’s betterment is in order to free ourselves from the burden of loving and caring about them. We might be willing to donate a sum of money each month to a certain seemingly philanthropic organization or cause, but the intention behind this contribution focuses on freeing us from the weight of feeling responsible and truly caring about all people.
Yet, nature is developing us toward genuine relations of love and care, a state where we shift our focus on self-concern to concern for others, thereby giving all of our heart to benefiting others.
In the meantime, we see no shortage of poverty, crime and a range of other problems in the world’s wealthiest countries. On one hand, the egoistic engine running in us, which powered humanity’s progress, has given rise to intricate scientific and technological sophistication; yet on the other hand, we bear witness to a world of perpetual crisis.
The missing element is the sincere motion to love others as we love ourselves. Most of us grew up hearing about and agreeing with “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but we did not learn how to implement those words. Instead, we became increasingly refined egoists who favored self-benefit, and at most, routinely donated some of our money and/or time seemingly for prosocial causes, instead of integrating with each other’s desires, needs and feelings, and developing genuine love and care throughout society.
If we achieved the full meaning of “Love your neighbor as yourself,” then we would literally experience heaven on earth.
Nature, which fundamentally functions according to laws of love and connection, is evolving us all toward a state of total interconnection and interdependence. Today’s world has already become more connected and interdependent superficially, such as through globally-intertwined economies and technologies, yet we experience this connection negatively, as evident in growing cases of depression, loneliness, anxiety, stress, mental health problems, and in all the hatred, division and polarization abounding in society.
Nevertheless, we will need to realize our increasing connection positively at one time or another, as it is an inescapable law of nature. Until we do, we will continue entangling ourselves in an increasingly complex web of troubles.
The more we let our inborn egoistic nature navigate our thoughts and actions in life, then the more we let hatred and division proliferate throughout society. And the more we let hatred and division proliferate throughout society, then the more remote we become from the fundamental unifying law of nature, which leads to everyone suffering more.
On the contrary, the moment we make moves to positively connect, developing a loving and caring atmosphere throughout society, we will then feel each other more and more. Also, our renewed focus on positively connecting to each other will awaken the force of love dwelling in nature. We will then experience a new atmosphere of calm, support, encouragement, positivity, happiness and confidence sweep throughout society, as if inverting the current negative waves of hatred and polarization to their positive form.
In a nutshell, we live in a single system of nature, and our experience of this system as harmonious or painful depends on whether or not we positively connect.
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