Many people think that the opposite of love is hatred, for hatred seeks to harm the one whom love would uplift. Others say that the opposite of love is indifference, for indifference ignores the other person altogether. While it is true that both hatred and indifference oppose love, they are each too small in scale to serve as love’s polar opposite. The true force that opposes love is self-centeredness.

It is self-centeredness that responds with hatred when another person hurts us or seems different from us. It is self-centeredness that responds with indifference toward those who cannot or will not benefit us. One may look at each of the “seven deadly sins”, and each of them is rooted in selfishness: envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath. All things that stand against love are rooted in selfishness. All things founded in love require the taming of one’s own self-centeredness.

If we wish to become better human beings, then, our most essential task is to learn to get over ourselves. We need to truly get into our hearts that the world does not and should not revolve around us. The Golden Rule is a good starting place; when we manage to treat others the way we wish to be treated, we greatly improve our lives and the lives of those around us. The greater challenge, however, is to internalize that rule, to love others the way we wish to be loved. That is the true key to reaching our human potential.

When we do learn to live in love, amazing results can happen. People like Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Jesus all show the power of a life dedicated to love. While most of us are unlikely ever to attain that level of achievement in the area of love, we do have the ability to change our own corners of the world for the better. By tempering our own egos and developing our capacities for compassion, we can build stronger families, more productive workplaces, and healthier communities. It’s all a matter of love.

Racism stems from a broader context of social transactions that are often termed “prejudice.” What I find interesting is that while that word immediately stimulates negative feelings in the ears of most people, we are all prejudiced! It is impossible for us to operate in the world without being prejudiced. Prejudice is the mechanism that enables us to discriminate among an unmanageable number of variables to make choices. Most of us have limited resources and must make quick choices. Prejudice is, in fact, a very useful tool in assisting us in the process of discriminating among a large number of variables.

“Prejudice” really simply means “prejudgment”. It means that we have used certain characteristics to help us efficiently sort among variables of an unknown and assist in our decision making. We use prejudice in all kinds of shopping decisions to help sort among variables. In today’s world, those of us who spend time on the Internet are quite familiar with the sorting devices that the social networking platforms give us to discriminate among our viewers and contacts. We need to be clear, then, in our understanding that to be “prejudiced” is not a bad thing. In fact it is a vital protective and selective device.

So where does it turn from being a useful social device to becoming a destructive and hateful device? Terms such as “all Black people are lazy” are phrases that characterize inappropriate, hateful and non-factual uses of the concept of “prejudice.”

Both within and without the GLBT community this has been a troublesome social phenomenon. It is troublesome because, while members of the GLBT community have been victims of prejudice and discrimination, they have also been perpetrators. One would expect that their victim status would make them extremely intolerant of prejudice and discrimination, and yet they go on inflicting the social disease on others (of course, without intending to do so).

Anyone who understands social dynamics is really not surprised, because people who have been wounded typically will wound other people. Nevertheless, the cycle of woundedness must be broken. The first step in breaking the cycle is creating awareness. We must become aware of how our behavior is hurting each other – on a very practical, day-to-day level. Whether we are part of an oppressor group or an oppressed group, we participate in prejudice in destructive ways that range from unconscious to intentional.

Many people have no awareness of the repeating patterns of their relationships. They never see the macro view. No healing can occur, because they are limited to the micro view. The solution may be as simple as finding a process observer. A process observer is a person outside the relationship (such as a close friend) who can observe behaviors and events over time. That person can provide objective feedback to the participant(s). There is a scripture in the Bible that says, “Physician heal thyself.” What that means is that the best doctor in the world cannot heal himself – it takes intervention from another doctor. We all need a process observer.

Racism is very insidious. Most people would not want to be racists. Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it creeps up on people in insidious ways. A process observer can show each of us how racism is evident in our relationships. Individually, each of us should have a goal to discover who we are at core level. Once that is achieved, we will not need to diminish another in order to elevate ourselves.

Only we can decide what discriminators are useful for our decision making and which represent hateful bias in our lives. The Henry Louis Gates issue was useful in calling our national consciousness to one aspect of this broad and deep issue. His high profile status brings a face that could not be brought by thousands of other nameless, non-cached individuals.

Down here on the ground we can see all the differences that divide us — race, gender, age, religion, social class – but from a view atop the mountain, we are less able to see those differences. At the leadership level, we must be blind to race and other divisive characteristics. We need to listen to reasonable voices from good people without regard to their gender, race, social class, or other demographics. The voice of wisdom may come in unlikely packaging. Scripture says, “Be careful how you entertain strangers, for some have entertained angels unaware.”

Race is an omnipresent factor in our society.  It shapes how we see ourselves and is a primary way in which we classify other people.  We view race as essentially tied to social class, education, culture, income and a host of personality traits.  Race is so powerful in shaping our perceptions that it is difficult to imagine a “colorless” world.

What may be surprising is that race as we currently understand it is a very new concept.  For most of human history and across most cultures, racial characteristics have been seen as interesting, but irrelevant.  People knew that foreigners had different coloration, facial features and hair textures, but no special significance was attached to these differences.  To the Romans, for instance, a citizen was a citizen, whether born in Italy or Nubia.  The ancient Greeks believed that racial differences were entirely environmental in origin, so that a person who spent enough years in a foreign land would take on the appearance and temperament of that land’s people.  Early writers would occasionally hurl racial epithets at their enemies, and every people saw themselves as more beautiful than anyone else, but there was no real sense of racial identity beyond the local tribe.  The differences we now categorize as racial were simply the external features that indicate an exotic origin.  If someone with foreign features became part of “our tribe”, then having a different coloration became irrelevant for that person.  They were one of “us”.

It was only within the past few hundred years, when Europeans conquered and colonized the rest of the world, that the idea of race as we now understand it developed.  Europeans created this new notion of race to justify their economic exploitation of others, especially in the slave trade.  When Europeans arrived in a new land, they justified their conquests by claiming that they were bringing Christianity to an ignorant people.  The problem was that once the indigenous people were converted, there was no longer any rationale for the Europeans’ continued abuses.  The idea of race was therefore invented to create an excuse for continued exploitation.  If local people were somehow intrinsically unable to govern themselves, then Europeans were justified in staying and maintaining control.  If people from Sub-Saharan Africa were not truly human, then it would be morally acceptable to treat them as livestock.  Race became a way to define non-Europeans as less than human, so that European imperialism and exploitation could be justified.  It allowed Europeans to sleep at night because the people they were abusing were not recognized as human.

Today, while the theory behind race continues to be false, the experience of race is real.  It is no longer purely a European phenomenon; all racial groups are complicit in maintaining the notion of race, for each benefits from it.  Those of “dominant” races use race to define their own way of life as superior, requiring always that others adapt to their way of doing things and never the other way around.  Minority races use race to claim victim status, which may then be used used to justify and motivate everything from greater personal drive to calls for entitlement or violence.  All racial groups have political and religious leaders who solidify their own power by directing fear and hatred toward other groups.  In the end, race is a concept that comforts us with real feelings of self-righteousness, but those feelings are based upon smoke and mirrors.

The reality is that race does not exist except in our minds.  It only has power because we have given power to it; there is no factual basis to our racial categories.  Even the most race-obsessed societies, such as Nazi Germany and the pre-Civil War U.S. South, could not create uniform and sensible ways of classifying people by race.  A global map showing each place’s dominant skin color would not show a world of “red and yellow, black and white”, but a broad and softly varying spectrum of earth tones.  The variations between us are too gradual to fit into the racial categories we have created.  The only scientifically sound racial group is the human race.  All others are illusions.

Perhaps it is time to return to the ancient understanding that race is simply the physical features that indicate a person’s land of origin.  These features may be distinctive, but they have no inherent value.  If we let go of our obsession over race, we will lose some of our own sense of self-righteousness, but in the end, we will become stronger by unifying as one people.  Given the global nature of the challenges we now face, we need to get beyond the artificial divisions that separate us.  The illusion of race only hinders us from building a better future.

When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattann Project, first witnessed the destructive power of the atomic bomb he helped to create, his reaction was a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  Following the war, he worked tirelessly to limit the scope and spread of nuclear weapons.  Oppenheimer recognized that humanity’s progress in his discipline of physics had gotten far ahead of our development in ethics, and until we had created an ethical framework that could cope with our new found ability to exterminate ourselves, we were all in terrible danger.  The rarefied world of theoretical physics suddenly had to deal with the responsibility of how the technology it produces could be used.

In a similar way, the discipline of biology was both excited and nervous when Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996.  That breakthrough and the initial release of data from the Human Genome Project in 2000 has caused scientists in the field of genetics to face a time of ethical soul-searching that is similar to what the physicists dealt with in the mid-1900′s.  We now have the ability to genetically manipulate ourselves and the creatures around us; to what extent should we allow this manipulation to occur?  Both the benefits and the risks potentially affect all of life.  The scientific community and legislative bodies have therefore created rules to govern this new responsibility.

As technology continues to advance at faster and faster rates, many disciplines have had to face the ethical implications of their work.  Medicine has many ongoing ethical issues, such as abortion, euthanasia and health care availability.  Computer science struggles with issues of privacy and dehumanization.  Applied sciences such as agriculture and manufacturing must now consider the environmental and safety implications of their processes.  Educators and social agencies must consider how their projects will affect all categories of people.

What unites these threads together is the recognition (in the words of Stan Lee) that with great power comes great responsibility.  In a world where knowledge is power, where innovation can have a profound impact on millions or billions of lives, it is absolutely imperative for every discipline to undergo periods of ethical review.  We need to understand how our new capabilities affect humanity as a whole, and we must intentionally decide as a people whether the benefits of a new technology outweigh its risks.  For disciplines that affect us all, there need to be both internal standards and external supervision and regulation.

Recently, Columbia University professor Bruce Kogut proposed that those who create financial innovations must accept responsibility for the results of their creations.  This is a radically new idea in the world of finance, built upon a foundation laid by scientists over the past sixty-five years.  It is the same thought that ran through Oppenheimer’s mind when he realized the destructive potential of his creation.  It is no longer possible to pretend that our financial system exists in some kind of ethical vacuum.  Like Oppenheimer’s bomb, it has the demonstrated ability to harm millions or billions of people.  In fact, it is designed for the express purpose of benefiting a small group of people who understand the technology at the expense of the majority who do not understand it.  It is time for those who understand the financial system to deal with the ethical questions of how and when their creation should be used to benefit humanity as a whole.  It is also time for society at large, through our governments, to set clear and reasonable boundaries for how financial innovations may be employed.  We should allow financial innovators to benefit from their inventions, but not at the expense of the rest of humanity.  With great power comes great responsibility.

So often when we look at the big problems in our relationships or society, the answers are quite simple — but doing what it takes is not easy.  Although we could give many examples, we want to focus on one specific issue: fighting.  In a previous post we explored the basis of fighting in our nature, and how it impacts us at a personal level and affects our national discourse.

It is no secret to anyone who has been reading newspapers or watching TV that fighting and aggression have become far too common in our national discourse and character.  In much of the recent political fighting, each party suggests when the other party is in power that the other party has an underlying agenda to dissolve our democratic form of government in favor of socialism or a dictatorship.  Both sides use deliberately provocative, misleading and inflammatory language to confuse and enrage the public against the other side.  Here is a quote from Alexander Fraser Tytler (1748-1813) that provides an interesting perspective:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.  The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.  These nations have progressed through this sequence: ‘From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.’

What if the alternatives were moving from fighting to love, rather than moving from abundance to selfishness?  It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

A resolution that has a list of ten covenants has been drafted by one of the U.S. political parties.  Each of its members must agree to at least eight of these covenants or be denied party support.  The requirement for concurrence with only eight out of ten is intended to show an allowance for diversity.  However, the entire notion of explicit standards for membership raises interesting questions about true allegiance.  Although almost all groups and societies have their creeds or organizing documents, it is not clear that written standards establish loyalty or belonging.

In the Christian faith, Jesus the Christ came along and challenged the Ten Commandments, which had long held the position of being the foundation of the faith.  Instead, he said, “If you love your creator and love all created ones just as you love yourself, you will have reached your goal.”

Anyone who has been in love knows that you cannot capture the qualities for love on a checklist.  Oh, you can write up a checklist, but when you meet the right person, you will throw the checklist out the window.  Why?  Because love in its essence cannot be captured on paper.  The energy that fuels and maintains love is not two-dimensional or even three-dimensional; it has more dimensions than could possibly be captured in physical space.

And so it is when we extrapolate people’s loyalty to a group.  The true essence of loyalty cannot be captured on two-dimensional paper or based on explicit standards.  If we try to reduce membership to such criteria, we miss the point.

Actual belonging — whether in a one-on-one relationship or in a larger group — is a function of the heart.  It happens at soul level.  That can never be put on paper.

Tomorrow, people across the U.S. will gather together for Thanksgiving Day.  Most of us will reflect upon the good things and good people that have been in our lives for the past year, and we will express our gratitude to the One who provides these gifts to us.  It is a day of gratefulness and appreciation.

This year, as you count your blessings, remember to include the painful elements of life.

I know that it sounds a bit odd, but remember to give thanks for the unpleasant times you have had along with the pleasant ones; show appreciation for your painful experiences along with the joyful ones.  Good times and pleasant people are easy to appreciate because they give us happy feelings, but bad times and dificult experiences are also vital to our health, for they compel us to grow.

For instance, what are the possible end results when a romantic relationship passes through a difficult stretch?  Either the couple will stay together through the ordeal and find their love for one another deepened through the shared experience, or they will realize that the relationship has no staying power, and each will go his or her own way.  Is not either outcome preferable to a shallow, stagnant relationship?  Or think about difficult economic times.  While we prefer the ease and comfort of wealth, it is when we financially struggle that we learn to appreciate what we have.  Rough economic times force us honestly to sort through our priorities as we stretch our resources, and having less money available to run all around town means that we end up spending more quality time with our families.

The same kinds of blessings may be found in any type of hardship.  In losing those things and people that made us comfortable, we begin a journey into the unknown that provides us with freedom, growth and change.  Entering into new life is difficult and painful, but it is good for us; it grants us wisdom and understanding and experience, all of which help us to become better people.  Profound insights emerge from the depths of despair, if we are open to them.

This Thanksgiving, as you list the blessings in your life, remember to give thanks for your sorrows.  They may not be pleasant to experience, but if you have the wisdom to learn, they are shaping you into a better human being.

In a recent article on RealAge.com, two doctors advised us to take time out of our busy days and deliberately practice deep breathing.  While this is not really new advice – and forms the basis for meditation and yoga – the article suggests a medical explanation for the benefits of deep breathing.  In the readers’ comments section, one reader suggested that this was just more impractical data; it doesn’t help us get the rent paid, so to speak.

We can either dismiss this reader’s comment or hear his words as part of a much larger sentiment.  Perhaps he echoes the tension we all feel when wrestling with the spiritual vs material aspects of managing our lives.  Even a doctor who advocates exercise may not maintain a regular routine of physical exercise, and certainly may overlook spiritually “tuning up”.

In the same way, the enlightened among us may say that exercise, meditation and prayer will enable us to meet life’s challenges with vigor and vitality, but do we model such behavior?  In our constant battle for time allocation, do our choices favor practical materialism over spiritual awakening?

When we are better prepared for a job, we perform better; but in the big job of “doing life”, do we take adequate time to prepare ourselves, or do we just go out and take our best shots?  No one going into battle would choose to go out unprepared, yet we dare to go out into the battlefield of life with no armor, no strategy and no resources.  No wonder, then, that we often do not win.

Our natural instinct is to deploy most of our resources to the tasks at hand, whatever those may be.  If, instead, we shift our priorities to preparedness, we will realize greater success.

          Aggression originates in the acute stress response found in all vertebrate creatures.  This instinct is sometimes referred to as the “fight or flight” response, and was first described by Walter Cannon in 1929.  It is perhaps the most basic survival instinct of the animal world.  When an animal perceives a change in its environment, such as the presence of another animal or an abrupt change in light levels, adrenaline and other hormones flood the body, resulting in heightened mental alertness and increased physical ability.  The animal is therefore better prepared to analyze the threat level posed by the stressor and to physically respond if the danger is real.  This heightened mental and physical state is better known as stress.  In both humans and animals, short-term stress is beneficial, as it provides additional resources to the mind and body when most needed for survival.

          While this stress instinct is commonly known by Cannon’s terminology of “fight or flight”, the actual behaviors caused by stress are somewhat more varied.  Many animals, for instance, freeze in place when threatened, essentially “fleeing” into the background environment.  Others might play dead.  An armadillo or a hedgehog might curl into a ball, or a skunk might spray its musk.  These are all variations of fighting or fleeing, as they either confront a danger or seek to avoid it.  An entirely third option is to befriend the stressor, perhaps through a non-threatening posture or a relaxed facial expression, in order to share resources and to establish that neither animal currently threatens the other. 

          Human psychology and intelligence vastly increases the range of behaviors caused by this stress, but they are all rooted in the same three choices of fighting, fleeing or befriending.  Fighting, for instance, may take the form of violence, passive aggression, social betrayal or verbal assault.  These are all ways of confronting a stressor.  Fleeing includes the whole range of psychological avoidance behaviors, including denial, conformity, and escapism.  Befriending includes the many ways in which we interact with the people and forces that threaten us in order to resolve those threats peacefully.  Despite our human sophistication, we ultimately have the same choices available to deal with our stressors as animals do with theirs; we may fight, we may flee, or we may seek to befriend.

          The next question, then, is why one person chooses to fight in a given situation while others choose to flee or befriend.  This is where the mathematical discipline of game theory comes into play.  Game theory examines behavior in strategic situations in which an individual’s success depends upon the choices made by another.  The results of various choices are often presented as a grid.  Here is a very simplistic one that models the possible stress responses: 

          As the grid shows, choosing the path of aggression maximizes the chance of winning – choosing to fight wins any time the opponent flees or befriends, and has a 50% chance of either winning or losing if the opponent is also aggressive.  Fleeing, on the other hand, minimizes the chance of losing.  A fleeing tactic will never win, but it will not lose, either.  Befriending is a bit more complex; it will lose against an aggressive opponent and win against a fleeing one, but the big payoff comes when both sides choose to befriend.  When the two sides manage to work together, everyone benefits.

          This simplistic model demonstrates the reasons different people choose different ways to respond to stress.  Those who choose the path of aggression do so because they want to win, and they fear that their opponent will also be aggressive.  Those who choose to flee are more concerned with avoiding a loss than in securing a gain, so they select a tactic that is least likely to result in a loss.  Those who choose to befriend are looking beyond the immediate conflict to try to establish a positive winning cycle that will benefit both players.  Of the three choices, befriending is the only one not rooted in fear, and it is the only one that creates a long-term solution to the conflict.  It is riskier than either fighting or fleeing because its results depend heavily upon the opponent’s choice, but once both sides learn the benefits of working together, befriending creates a positive cycle that keeps both sides winning.

Our society loves to define ourselves by putting everyone in categories.  We live in tidy compartments of ethnicity, religion, politics, gender, age, sexuality and more.  In some cases, these labels mean very little, but in other cases, the circles we draw define who is on our side and who is the enemy.  

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln (quoting Matthew 12:25) pointed out that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.  He was speaking specifically to the issue of slavery in his day, but the same is true concerning the divisions that separate us today.  So long as we strive and contend against one another, we cannot move forward as a people.  Instead, we waste our energy and our resources on internal struggles. 

If we seek real solutions to today’s problems, we must move beyond the “us versus them” way of thinking.  Our true economic recovery will come when the wealthy, the middle class and the poor all recognize that their own success depends upon the others’.  Our health care issues will be resolved when we choose to provide all people with the level of care that we expect for ourselves.  Our turmoil over social issues will give way to understanding once we genuinely listen to each other’s stories.  It’s simply a matter of drawing circles that take the other person in.