People need to intentionally stop being selfish to avoid total disaster, social and environmental. That has never been more true than now when science and technology have given us the power to destroy ourselves through weapons and environmental destruction.
They need to give to the poor at a cost to themselves (The Widow's Mite)
They need to preserve nature (Woe unto them who join house to house and field to field)
They need to love their neighbor as themselves, they need to love the alien among them and treat them as they would their neighbor.
It is hard to stop being selfish, really hard. Really, really hard and you are the one that ultimately depends on.
No one can be unselfish for you.
And, since we are talking about people, in the plural, avoiding total disaster depends on enough of us not being selfish more often than not.
People need the power that believing that they are required to be unselfish to get over the inertia inherent in selfishness provides. There is no other source of the power to make them act unselfishly. People are nothing if not accomplished at trying to avoid the consequences of their selfishness and, given the reality we live under, those consequences are our common burden. They have to REALLY believe that they have to and that there is a reason that other people have a right to them being unselfish, a right that they have to other people being unselfish to them.
They have to understand it in terms of mutually held rights, that good treatment isn't a privilege unequally distributed but a right which is held by all, including them. That is the fabric that the experience and exercise of rights depends on, every individual has to be part of that fabric, all of them are equally part of the strains and stresses on that fabric, the strength of rights depends on the entitlement of all people to their rights.
There is no material explanation of the existence of rights that doesn't damage their reality, no fable of evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, no assertion of their origin as an adaptation under natural selection, no assertion of them as being the byproduct of social consensus or similar attempt at coming up with them as a material phenomenon, an after thought at best when the materialist is challenged on that point. Materialists from time immemorial have come up with reasons to deny the reality of rights and moral obligations and the reality that they depend on to be made manifest in the actions of individuals and, especially in societies.
This is why religious faith in their reality is an absolute prerequisite for them existing, that is why religion was where they first were articulated and the source of their strongest assertion. You have to BELIEVE in their reality in the face of every temptation to deny that they are real and binding on you even as you enjoy their results and even as you are taught and programmed and brainwashed out of believing in them for other people and, in many cases, that your rights are part of the fabric they depend on.
The history of human depravity in the absence of that belief is entirely more real, the evil of that history more compelling than any materialistic assertions denying their reality. They are as real a part of human experience as the experience of any physical phenomenon or any verified aspect of scientific observation or experiment. People have as much of a right to believe their observations of that history, to conclude its character as anyone does to look at the fossil record or the sparks from a massive apparatus of the physics establishment and assert the reality of what they see there. In fact, more open to an accurate comparison with other human experience, verifiable in direct experience instead of indirect inference, the lessons of human history are more reliably real than virtually any finding of science. That history of human depravity flowing from the denial of rights and moral obligations is entirely more real than the "scientific" attacks on them and their essential, metaphysical foundations.
With the history of human societies and the lessons that are learned from that experience or not learned from that we come to the political manifestation of equal rights and the decent society that depends on the common belief in their reality. When the idealistic assertion of individual rights was made, dissolving the asserted rights of the British monarch over the inhabitants of North America, it was held that the truth of rights, an endowment of The Creator, were self evident. That is a fixed axiom without which you cannot derive a democracy and the decent society that is the only legitimate reason for governments to exist. There is no other one that works, there is no assertion of sociological fantasy that will work to create a decent democratic socieity because people have to believe it with all of their heart and mind and strength and soul to do it, to sacrifice to do it, to maintain the sacrifice as long as necessary and to continue the work of securing it against the ever present temptation of selfishness and convenient, self-serving skepticism that can destroy it through denial.
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