What haven’t we tried? We’ve had emperors, czars, and kings galore. We’ve had despotism, communism, capitalism, Nazism, socialism, and liberalism. We’ve had monarchy, theocracy, autocracy, and democracy. We’ve had psychiatry, psychology, meditation, and Buddhism. And what did we get out of all our efforts? A crazed planet whose most developed creatures exert frantically to destroy each other, all of life, and the planet itself. And worst of all, even though they know for certain that their destructiveness will lead to their own death, they cannot stop.
We have lost control of our lives because we have lost control of our raging egos. For all our efforts, we cannot simply choose to stop destroying everyone and everything. Why are we like that? Because we’re making all our efforts using our inbuilt engine: egoism. When you use your ego to curb your ego, it doesn’t work. In this, we have no free will.
But we do have free will. Just as there is ego, there is goodness in nature, a positive force. It is in nature, not in us. This is why nature thrives when there are no humans. We can tap into this force by building social systems that use this force as their foundation.
At the moment, we build societies in our own (selfish) image. But if we build a society in the image of the (unselfish) surrounding nature, the environment we live in will change us by itself.
But such a society will not form by itself. We must choose to establish it. Here is where our free will lies—in choosing to build a society based not on our egos, but on the surrounding nature’s positive force. This is the only way we will ever be able to make a free choice, not governed by our inherent selfishness.
[Photo by Sanjeevan SatheesKumar on Unsplash]