For my first blog I would like to share a paper I wrote recently on how we can make the world a better place.

My definition of World Order is the following: where there is stability among every sovereign state, not a “balance of power” that could shift at any moment, a community where we hold each other accountable for acts of crime in the State level and in the international level, a community where human rights are more important than how large a State’s ICBM is and lastly, where the individual is the most sacred being, it is treasured because of the wondrous mysteries it entails and the limitless potential is has for good. At first glance, that sounds like a compelling definition for World Order but there is more to it than that. Individuals should be the most sacred being on the planet, however not because of the limitless potential it has for good but for the potential it has to cooperate with the rest of humanity to conquer peace, justice, economic well-being and ecological stability. There should be no sense of entitlement for an individual, we are all an interconnected species by nature. One could say we right now we are the most interconnected we have been in human history because of globalization but at times, it seems as if we cannot recognize each other as fellow individuals working and surviving on this planet as one. The path in which I am going to explain this goal for an improved world order is through universal love. Some of the great thinkers of the twentieth century Miguel de Unamuno, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Rollo May are but a few of my sources for this proposition but we have only scratched the surface of improving ourselves through love to solve war, terror, genocide, discrimination and poverty.

If we grow and learn about humanity by moving past our hunger for immortality and learn to love one another as an interconnected species through mutual selflessness and personalization, then we can begin to live in an improved world order with stability among every sovereign state, accountability for our actions on the state and international level, a community where human rights are of the highest importance in legislation and enforcement and lastly, where individuals are sacred for the potential they have for peace, justice, economic well-being and ecological stability as a unified, interconnected globalized body.

The largest sign in my room is of John Lennon’s memorial in Strawberry Fields located at the heart of Central Park. All it says is “Imagine” surrounded by rose pedals. When I cannot sleep at night or when I am working on an assignment I will sometimes glance at that sign and think of a better world. His lyrics are still echoed in today’s culture: “Imagine all the people sharing all the world…..and the world will live as one;” these carefully constructed words will still resonate as long as we continue the fighting and terror that exists every day on this tiny planet. Lennon was protesting the Vietnam War but we can “Imagine” a better world today. We have the capability to improve world order but it includes everyone “living life in peace” as Lennon whispered to Yoko and to the world. As I have previously written, in order to improve the world we must not focus on our differences but instead our similarities. We are all very similar in which we have the same feelings and emotions because our DNA is 99% the same. We must learn to love one another, not kill one another. A human soul is worth all the universe. Recently in Ferguson, Missouri, an unarmed eighteen year old was shot and killed for reasons we may never know why but within a week of the shooting the National Guard was dropped in with shock grenades and tear gas hoping to bring order, not peace to the rioting town. That’s not the right way to solve any conflict, with more weapons and scare tactics. If we had moved past racial discrimination as a society and instead towards prosperity, none of this would have happened.

Unamuno said in The Tragic Sense of Life, “Man sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in order to preserve his life,” meaning men only look out for themselves. There is no sense of oneness or connectedness as preached in Buddhism. Love is the most powerful force in the universe and in order to improve the well-being of every soul, we must embrace empathy for one another, our own mortality and the caring of everyone. As Albert Einstein said, “Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison [a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness] by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” On the condition of our own mortality, the only way to not live in pure agony is to love and to love “Is to renew our life in another, for only in others can we renew our life”. (Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life)

“There is no remedy for love but to love more,” Thoreau said meaning when someone has a broken heart and feels emptied the only way to fill that emptiness is with love. The potential we all have to love is something we cannot fathom because it is so great. Our innermost core human instinct is not to kill or survive, it is to love, disproving Thomas Hobbes’ viewpoint on life in anarchy. Emily Dickinson, a woman who mostly lived an introverted and reclusive life once said “Love…is the exponent of breath.” Dickinson learned that love was necessary to life and the reason for living. Love is the foundation of human society because it is something that every being desires.

When we love other people we always begin with those most akin to us, with those with live with us then those whom we work and socialize with. That’s the easy track to an improved world order. What comes next is the step we must take. We must learn to love those whom we have never met and will probably never meet. We must learn to love those suffering on the evening news and those in the streets that don’t have sufficient food and water to survive. If, and only if we can achieve this universal love we can move to loving things that don’t have life but merely existence. Miguel de Unamuno, whom wrote extensively on universal love put it best when he said:

“If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able to look – that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which all things have traced their painful impression – you will arrive at the abyss of the tedium, not merely life, but of something more: at the tedium of existence, at the bottomless of the vanity of vanities. And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal love.” (Tragic Sense of Life)

Unamuno talks about pity being equivalent to love. I partly disagree. He says pity is the essence of human spiritual love and that love pities and pities most when it loves most. He also says men love one another when they have suffered the same sorrow together. He might be right but I believe it is possible to love another human being without suffering the same sorrow. We commonly and nonchalantly say “before you judge, put yourself in their shoes,” but that is impossible. We are taught to try and understand what someone is going through, whether a loss in the family or an illness when we empathize but that is nearly impossible. We might have experienced something similar in the past but it cannot be the exact same circumstance. Last week my great-grandmother passed away after living for ninety-six years and when people asked me what happened they said they were sorry and some said they had experienced a loss recently too. It was comforting to hear and be cared for, but it was not equal to what I was experiencing. We can love one another through pity, but it is not through pity that love arises. We can pity each other and not love. We can pity those who lost in an election, for example, but that does not mean we care for them and love them. “For love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united by pain.” (Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life) I would change that to instead say, “For to love is to live, and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united by brotherhood.”

Friedrich Schiller wrote Ode to Joy or An die Freude in 1785, best known for its musical setting by Ludwig Van Beethoven in the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony. He wrote Alle Menschen werden Brüder, or All men become brothers; trying to celebrate the brotherhood of man. This tune is the anthem of the European Union and the Council of Europe, both of which refer to it as the European Anthem. This piece is arguably one of the most beautiful and prolific symphonies ever written and if a poet can unite an entire continent years after his death, the potential a cooperative, connected group has is limitless.

“To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.” (Rollo May, The Discovery of Being) Loving one another will bring about an intensity of consciousness that we do not even know about, we cannot predict or fathom but that is what makes the individual so precious. The individual has the power to encourage universal love, love of grief, sorrow, disappointment, as well as joy and happiness. Happiness and the meaningfulness of life can only be experienced by the individual, not the group, or State, or herd. Ultimately, everything in the universe depends on the quality and well-being of the individual. If we as a species understood this, we would not shoot unarmed teenagers in the street, or recruit young people in ISIL or allow genocide and discrimination. In modern terms, and according to C. G. Jung, the goal and meaning of the individual no longer lies in the development and growth of the individual but rather in the policy of the State, which thrust upon the individual. In other words, the moral hierarchy and responsibility of the individual is replaced by the policy of the State.

This phenomenon has occurred since the beginning of time, those who have the money will rule, coined as the Iron Law of Oligarchy by German sociologist Robert Michels. Changing and bettering the world does not mean we must teach those in public office how to do their jobs better but rather teach the incoming generation the value of the individual and of human life and its potential for good when cooperation is conquered. Those who are wealthy will almost always rule and have the power. Our world is powered by the direction and flow of money and that I do not have a feasible answer for but we do have the ability to preach love and prosperity to each other on a global scale.

Like I have explained many times before, our greatest common factor is our mortality. We will all die someday but “our awareness of death is blunted by deception” (Beres, “Ancient Manuscripts and Modern Politics”). Our mortality is the easiest path to overcoming societal divisions that arise in race, religion and geography. We still however, see death and terror and blood on the evening news but we think that will never happen to one of us. In the United States, one in three people will die of cancer but we believe there is something about that statistic that does not include us. I doubt I have met someone who has not been affected by cancer by a friend or family member and yet we do not think it will happen to one of us. We believe there has to be something will protect us and give us life. I spoke earlier about my great-grandmother passing away recently and she had not opened her eyes or mouth in several days but according to the nurses who cared for her, moments before she passed away she opened her eyes and looked around the room. She was probably looking for help to save her from death but nothing could be done. We cannot be blunted by deception when given a finite lifespan.

Our hunger for immortality will lead to our greatest demise whereas our hunger for love will only lead to prosperity and peace. “There is a world, the sensible world, that is the child of hunger, and there is another world, the ideal world, that is the child of love.” (Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life) Universal love is ideal for justice, peace, economic well-being and ecological stability. Hunger, in this context can mean many things, it can mean hunger for fame, hunger for immortality, or hunger for war. Hunger for fame is but a pedestrian hunger, “the heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it the less is the share of each.” (Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life) Fame may make someone’s name last for lifetimes but once your life ends, it won’t matter anymore. Your understanding and comprehension of the physical world ends with your death. Reaching for eternal fame and glory is pointless. The hunger for war is an obvious detriment to society. War is puzzling to me as to why it exists when there are far better ways in solving conflict and negotiating treaties. Once these awful needs are satisfied whether in a nuclear war or an environmental catastrophe, the necessity of universal empathy and care will arise.

A key point that must be made in striving to reach universal love is in order to love everything, you must feel everything within yourself. The undiscovered human being is one of the few remaining treasures of scientific and psychological advancement. Man is an enigma to himself. Our psyche remains an insoluble puzzle and an incomprehensible wonder however the value of the individual is negligible to the value of the crowd. Our fear of death is harmful to our growth but so is our fear of not belonging, of living outside the crowd. Henry David Thoreau spent two years, if not more, of his life living in a home he built around the shores of Walden Pond living deliberately and fronting only the essential facts of life. Not everyone has his drive to live life on its lowest terms but only there was he able to understand the true meaning and genuineness of life and of the world. He realized many things, one of which was natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for social conditions. Thoreau was an influence to Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., specifically his philosophy of civil disobedience.

Thoreau, one of the greatest American thinkers of all time also lived a life of Zen Buddhism. In Zen, there is no idea of self, we are all interconnected; the trees and the animals and us, all connected. Zen Buddhism is the exact opposite of Western thought. In Western civilization, especially in the United States, we are consumed by what we have. Bernie Glassman, in his book Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen, said “We suffer for many reasons: because we don’t have what we want; because we have what we want; because we have what we don’t want; because we have what we want but it’s fading away; because we’re fading away and getting old; because we’re not old enough.” In Zen Buddhism, acceptance of the world is key. We suffer because we don’t accept things as they are. We see and hear and feel what we want to see and hear and feel. We survive to make everything as best as possible for ourselves individually instead of as a whole community or oneness. For the longest time, physicists have been longing for the basic building block of all existence but they will never find it. Once they think they have found it, they will only comprehend it as another concept and search further. Eventually we will understand that there is no entity or self but only an image of the universe on a microscopic scale.

Universal love must be understood through the concept of universal oneness or connectedness. However, it is difficult to live this notion of oneness because few know what it really means. The world does not speak to our guts, only to our heads and love is not derived from the brain, it originates in the character of a human being or the heart. The way we can see and experience this oneness is to simply let go of the self. The idea of the self, of the ego, exploits our jealousy in others. When we are jealous of others, we are not appreciating ourselves enough. As long as the idea of the self intrudes our basic thought we will become jealous of others. We cannot eliminate this feeling but we can transform it into support and love. When the notion of self is transformed into an understanding of oneness, jealousy becomes an act of love.
Woodrow Wilson, from “On Being Human” said “The art of being human begins with the practice of being genuine,” being genuine means caring for each other in the most innocent and empathetic ways. In personal relationships, we become one and we reach a point where we no longer think about it. We no longer think about how we consider the other party when making decisions. For a simpler example, take the idea of the baby and the mother. For a time, they are literally one body and when the mother is nourished, so is the baby. When the child cries or needs something, it is taken care of automatically by the mother. There is no separation between the two, they are whole, and they are one. This is pure love, the purest of them all. We must apply this to all living things. We have to live as one and love one another and look out for one another. From Glassman’s Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen, Shalyamuni Buddha said, “Everything is my child.” Imagine living in a world where we functioned as if everything was our child and we were not separate from one another.

As we learn and age, we find new infinite circles that we associate ourselves with. First, it is our family. The people who raise us and grow with us our entire lives. Then it is the friend group, a usual ephemeral stage of people who might live close geographically or have similar interests, but few are everlasting. Then there are those who we work with. A group not often seen as friends in American culture but nonetheless important to our spiritual growth and process. That is usually where it ends for people. Some find loved ones to care for, some find friendships in odd places but for the most part our empathy reaches a certain limit. I, myself like to not have too many friends. When I have too many my mind becomes stressed because I want to help everyone and love everyone but other people have a higher limit of human empathy and love. This is the problem of universal love and oneness, our ill-defined limit. We can expand this limit and possibly make our human empathy limitless if we eliminate the instinct of personal preservation and livelihood. Miguel de Unamuno, in The Tragic Sense of Life said, “the instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the human individual; the instinct of perpetuation, love, in its most rudimentary and physiological form, is the foundation of human society.” Love has more willpower and potential for peace and justice than the instinct of personal preservation.

Returning back to our hunger for immortality, Unamuno said in his native language, “Cada vez que considero que me tengo que morir, tiendo la capa en el suelo y no me harto de dormir.” Each time that I consider that it is my lot to die, I spread my cloak upon the ground and am never surfeited with sleeping. We are all multicellular organisms that will at one point decay and die. It is our basic nature. But, if we live as humans instead of as Americans, or Germans, or as Chinese we can improve world order. We can get closer to peace, justice, economic well-being and ecological stability. If we all believe in our salvation from complete nothingness we can begin to do better. We can being to eliminate poverty, discrimination, war and terror. The belief that once you die, the world as far as you are concerned is finished is fraudulent. The longing for life, for more life, to perpetuate life only leads to death. Those who see death as a natural occurrence and one that is inevitable are more moved to live a life of love. I will not condemn religion as a way in which we are held back from living life to the fullest and living to love but as someone who is not religious I am not moved by pictures and depictions of hell. What moves me and what makes me want to be the best person I can be for the world is that after I die I believe there is nothing. Pure nothingness is something our brains cannot imagine and few can survive knowing this is it for our consciousness.

“The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness,” Unamuno wrote meaning where there is no consciousness, there is no finality, presupposing a purpose within ourselves. Unamuno said we need God not only to understand why we live but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give meaning to the Universe. He said Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe. Man wishes to save his subjectivity by attributing life, personality and spirit to the whole Universe. We wish to feel the existence of everything in the Universe, we wish to personalize everything. Unamuno said God is the personification of the Universe but I think this personification exists in an area of the mind we have not discovered yet. Perhaps, if we were to possess the consciousness of all that happens in the Universe we could eradicate our limitedness of human empathy and begin to experience universal love and live as a connected species.

Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual. Unfortunately, we as a mass only see the future in a fatal short-sightedness which is detrimental to our growth as a unified body. If we can – and I know we can because we have all the capabilities to make this come true – focus our attention to those who do not have a clean glass a water every day or the estimated fifty million people that are still slaves or the estimated one hundred and fifty million women that have been genitally mutilated instead of who can get the best deal on Black Friday we will be much closer to universal accountability and love. Some structural changes that can be made to help facilitate these global aspirations would be to give the United Nations an army to enforce the international laws that are being broken every day regarding human rights and national security. Let us care for one another no matter the national origin of someone. For example, Operation Frequent Wind was the final phase in the evacuation of American civilians and “at-risk” Vietnamese from Saigon, South Vietnam before the Fall of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army. It was a successful evacuation of seven thousand Americans and South Vietnamese. Not only were these people rescued from attack but after the Vietnam War, around a hundred and forty thousand Vietnamese refugees were granted US visas in only four months in the safe U.S. territory of Guam. Today, there are Iraqi and Afghan civilians who translate for NATO forces. These people risk their lives and the lives of their family members to protect NATO soldiers. These people should be granted immunity from terrorist organizations. These people, as well as their families, should be granted US visas but since 2010, only a handful of these translators have received visas. Only a handful. This, in part is because of the American bureaucratic process in which people earn visas but also because our priorities are not the right state of mind. We worry about our own civilians first as a nation before those who are far worse off than we are. Those whose families are hiding in fear of being decapitated.

Another example of this would be the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It was a mass slaughter of Tutsi by the Hutu majority. During a one hundred day period, an estimated eight hundred thousand people were killed, the greatest slaughter since World War II. Twenty percent of the country’s total population as well as seventy percent of the Tutsis living in the country were killed. The world order threat and relevant problem to my analysis is that only citizens of western countries were rescued. UNAMIR (the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) assumed that the national citizens of western countries were the only important innocent people. There were no U.S. troops officially at the onset of the genocide. Once again, bureaucratic infighting slowed the U.S. response to saving lives and to the genocide in general. President Clinton was already embarrassed after the events in Somalia and did not want to intervene again if it was too costly. After the Battle of Mogadishu on Somalia, bodies of several U.S. casualties were dragged through the streets by crowds of local civilians and members of the Somalian National Alliance. According to U.S. former deputy special envoy to Somalia, Walter Clarke: “The ghosts of Somalia continue to haunt US policy. Our lack of response in Rwanda was a fear of getting involved in something like a Somalia all over again.” When citizens of western countries were being evacuated from Rwanda, we saw on the evening news UNAMIR forces picking out white people from crowds of innocent Rwandan civilians to board helicopters for safety. I cannot think of anything more ridiculous. The national origin and race of a human being does not and should not make any soul more important than another. A human soul is worth all the universe.

We are all united by our mortality and by our limits as individuals. We can live as one if we unite ourselves with all others. Freud said it best when he remarked, “Every civilization will need to unite each single human life with all others;” no matter what religion, or race or geographical position someone may be from we are all one body and our greatest danger to mankind will be either an environmental catastrophe or a militaristic self-destruction. We should not be divided by geography or religion, but instead by how we can solve global issues such as global warming, human rights violations and poverty. The global arms race is increasing exponentially while the national securities of the world are eroding. Countries should spend equal if not more funding on education and health care than military operations. “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to obtain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element can move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.” (Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin) Life is not a zero-sum game. We can all prosper and live graciously if we think of ourselves as one, as an interconnected, loving species. Former President Bill Clinton once said, “We [Democrats] think ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you are on your own.’”

Once we drop the idea of the small self – the individual – ignorance, anger and greed become selfless desires because we realize we are all one body. Drop these feelings and the desire for the whole universe to be enlightened will come true. We should no longer think and act out of the function of the small self but of the big self, or the whole universe. “Because I want me to be enlightened, and I am the whole universe!” (Glassman, Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen)

Martin Buber, an Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher best known for his thoughts on existentialism and the I-Thou relationship in dialogue once said “Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling – the equality of all lovers.” Our greatest gift is the time we share with one another and love is our greatest human need. Universal love is my goal and dream for an improved world order but this will not happen immediately. It takes a lifetime to learn to love skillfully because as we mature we deepen the power of love to provide satisfaction for our self and for those we love. Considering the welfare of others should not feel like a sacrifice but more as a duty as human beings. Improving the welfare of others is an investment for overall peace and justice.

In conclusion, my idea of an improved world order through universal love as living as one interconnected body might seem impractical to some, but I have tremendous hopes for the future of mankind. I do not see myself as blind to reality and what is feasible in this world, I recognize what we have done to ourselves and we can do better. We must do better. Soon, we will have no choice but to love one another and before more lives are sacrificed to irrelevant enemies, we must let go of our personal pride and preservation. We must let go from seeing others as the enemy and instead as a brother of mankind. From this, I stress my hypothesis for a better tomorrow.