I have always been amazed by people and their ability to care for someone they don’t know. A few years ago, I wanted to learn more about this remarkable attitude. It’s one of the reasons that led me to start a research on the origin tendency of adaptation of the human species and this inclinaison to take care.
In fact, a few years ago, I had experienced health problems and witnessed this amazing ability from people in Montreal and elsewhere in the world. But most of these people who took some care during my illness, I didn’t even know them and they even didn’t know me, but they understood my suffering.
Today I would like to take this opportunity to thank the thousands of people that chose to take care of me during my illness. They surely saved my life.
You are my heroes and represent a new future. You are participating in opening possibility to amplify the operatives freedom of the human consciousness.
According to Dario Ergas essay, in order to amplify consciousness and formalize a new future for oneself and the human species, it is necessary for the human being’s look to reach a certain depth beyond that which he usually has “stuck to our skin“.
Ergas explained that the difficulty in reaching a certain depth into the mental space lies in the way we see the world, the others and ourselves.
In fact, we have integrated a “stuck to our skin look” during our socialization process, a look with a tendency to fragmented oneself and others abilities.
Jean-Paul Sartre explains how bad faith is generated from this fragmented way of being in the world. In this way of being in the world the field of human freedom and responsibilities seems to disappeared – than a false reality appeared. A reality where untruthful relations with oneself and others is normalized.
In this way of being, the individual is convinced that the reality is normalized by a way of acting in the world which doesn’t really harm others. Rather, according to the individual his actions express a point of view—and an ethics. But this ethics is based on this untruthful and fragmented look upon oneself.
Per say, in a false reality – or fragmented reality – it may happen that someone is defining someone else as a friend and deliberately treating him-her disloyally by damaging his-her living conditions to strategically gain some advantages. Moreover, if confronted this individual will not consider his actions as being dominated by bad faith, on the contrary he will justify them base on a normalized ethics.
Everyone doesn’t so why wouldn’t I do it, plus this friend deserves to suffer for what he-she did to me.
In the work Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, Jean-Paul Sartre provides more explanations and the phenomenological descriptions of emotion, consciousness in bad faith.
(…) consciousness alters the body—or, if one prefers, the body immediately inherent to consciousness—and shifts to a certain type of conduct and physiological manifestations (…) such as fever, angina, over-excitation, etc. They simply represent the total and crude upheaval of the body (the conduct itself will determine whether this upheaval results in a diminution or an enhancement of life) (Jean-Paul Sartre, french translation 1995).
Sartre explains how emotions are linked to our looks and body. In short, the looks and body form a structure linked to consciousness, called subject-consciousness-world. Consciousness translates the impulses coming from the various points of tensions of our body (memory and senses) into a response. As Ergas points out, when our look is “glued to our skin,” it becomes difficult for someone to see another person as a free human being, to consider their position, their suffering and moreover their possibility to transcend.
In our society, the fact that most people are locked into a pattern of exclusively receiving which is reinforced by this look—glued to our skin— doesn’t allowed mental space to develop and process a new response and amplified the operative freedom of the human consciousness. Thus trapped in a perspective essentially focused on oneselves, when one perceive an advantage or gain in maintaining a relationship with a “friend”—while simultaneously causing this friend harm—the harm cause seems insignificant. Moreover, when this friend lives far away from me.
Yet, if everyone is conditioned by this look ‘glued to our skin’ and the behaviour pattern of receving it raises the question: why do some people act for another’s well-being without even knowing them, while others act with bad faith?
In some way the people who choose to care for others — perform an empirical act. It seems these people have found another way to channel their energies into the world rather than always receiving. They learned to treat themselves and others with liberty. They do something far more significant than what most people do: they project an inner meaning into the world and toward others. In doing so, they perform an empirically transferential function. Then we say, they are not merely responding to conventional stimuli like they were trained to do, but are actively composing meanings that radiate from within themselves toward the world.
But someone could also say that the people who choose to help another benefit from it?
Obviously, perhaps some benefit from it, but the benefit is not in the pattern behaviour of receiving or giving, but in the direction of the act itself.
The acts of solidarity are included in the oldest teaching – the Gloden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. These acts of solidarity give a direction to life. It gives a direction to the one who produces it and to the one who receives it. It’s a personal act that open the future within a world dominated by chronic individualism, where collective fear of the “other” crushes the aspirations of a better world.
But how do we define the treatment of others?
Immanuel Kant, one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment, famously criticized the Golden Rule for not being sensitive to differences of situation, pointing out – that if we applied this rule to our society – a judge would not be able to send anyone in prison – he could not deprived the other who committed a crimes from his freedom.
In fact, Kant explains that the Golden rule only addresses how we treat others, and completely omits a person’s moral obligations and duties toward themselves and others.
In his message, Silo corrects this situation and proposes to add the principle of freedom which he called the principle on liberty.
Silo explains that the Golden Rule alone explains how one wants to be treated but doesn’t define the treatment of others, that is why it’s of great importance to complement the Golden Rule with the principle of liberty ;
When you harm others you remain chained, but if you do not harm anyone you can freely do whatever you want.(principle of liberty)
The principle of liberty explains that when you create problems for others, as a consequence your actions will be enchained into a reactive sequence which will limit your own freedom and liberty. But the second part of the principle explained that there is no reason for not doing what you want if no one is harmed by your actions.
Then, my friends, we can go freely, since nobody told us to help another and nobody told us to care for the other.
We can decided freely to help others and care for others and by doing so we channel our energy in the world towards the enhancement of life.
By deciding to stand together applying the Golden Rule and the principle of liberty we defying this inhumane system which thrives on division, fragmentation and the mistreatment of one another.
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Source;
Study on the Inner look, Dario Ergas, Puntas de Vacas, Park of studies and Reflection, Argentina, 2021
L’esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, Jean-Paul Sartre, Références, Paris, 1995