Choose one person who is the most important to you. Is this person you are thinking of the most significant to everyone else in the world? More than likely, they aren’t. Though your best friend might be more important to you than the mailman from your perspective, you can’t say that your friend is worth more than anyone else. How do you determine whose life should be valued the highest? There is no answer to this, because there isn’t one person that is the best overall. No human life is more significant than another.
Everyone is different. One person might be better at a specific task than another, but that doesn’t mean that he or she is a superior human. People are people, no matter what they look like, where they come from or what they believe. No one should be treated lesser than anyone else.
Commonly, mistreatment is due to a lack of consideration towards someone else in a situation. “As long as it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care what happens to everyone else,” is frequently thought about by many. There are many times when it would be easier to only take care of yourself and to not worry about others.
Selfishness is, in its simplest form, a primitive method of survival. Going back to times where hunter-gatherer societies were the norm, scavenging for apricots can be symbolic of the relationship between selfishness and selflessness. If you hoard all of the apricots for yourself, you’ll survive. Though others around you will suffer from your greediness, as long as you are okay, what else matters? Yet, when you are on the other side of this situation and you have absolutely no apricots to eat, you will most likely disagree with allowing only one person to have all of the fruit.
Over the years, humans have realized that by cooperating, we can become more successful. By having a large group of people all scavenge for apricots and then divide them equally, the chances of survival for everyone will increase. The group will be able to find more apricots, and even if one person is not successful, he or she will still be able to survive.
Though apricots and the treatment of people might seem completely unrelated, there is a simple solution to both situations: the “Golden Rule.” This rule, stated frequently throughout history, exemplifies the solution to many world problems. Treating others how you expect to be treated is key to becoming not only more successful as a whole, but happier, too. If you were apricot-less, you would hope that the person with all of the apricots would share. If the situation arises where you have all of the apricots, it’s important to remember what it felt like when you had nothing. It’s important to put yourself in someone else’s place before any decisions are made about how to treat that person.
There is a significant amount of bitterness in the world, and many groups of people believe that they are better than other groups. For example, say Christians believe that Muslims are wrong in their teachings. Likewise, Muslims disagree with what Christians practice. How do we determine who is right in this situation? Imagine there were two of you. The first version of you is born into a Christian home, while another is born into a family that practices Muslim beliefs. How do you justify being mad at your other self for believing what you were raised with? Would you hate the other version of you just for being brought up in a different environment?
Thinking of others first is not always easy. There are times when putting others before yourself is inconvenient. However, if everyone practices selflessness, there will always be someone watching your back, too. The Golden Rule is the solution to discrimination and hate— it is the only way to make sure that no life is labeled as more important than another.