IF, we are all the same,
THEN it is fair to treat everyone the same,
and unfair to treat different people differently.
However,
IF, we are all the different,
THEN it is fair to treat everyone differently,
and unfair to treat different people the same.
In a world of different people, sometimes very different people, there are many things we all have in common.
1. We all need to have a personally meaningful dream or goal to organize our efforts, and our energies, and help us to set priorities when the natural limitations of time, space, resources, etc. force decisions. I call this part of each of us a ‘unique spirit’.
2. We all have a ‘thinking mind’, a place where we reflect on our experiences and try to build better rules for our futures. But each individual thinking mind can be very different from the people right around us as well as those far away. This ‘thinking mind’ which requires the notions of past and future, seems to be one of the differences between us and other animals, even mammals. Like a double edged sword, it is both our finest gift, and the source of our greatest miseries.
3. We all have an ‘emotional mind’, a place that protects and nourishes all of the rest of us, our ‘thinking minds’, our unique spirits, our physical bodies, and the various communities we live in and depend upon.
4. We all have a physical body. A simple way of defining it, is it’s what gets buried or burned after we die. But while alive it is a great source of both pleasure and pain. While each of us has a human body, the differences in those bodies varies quite widely. Ignoring those individual differences causes our bodies much pain, and our emotional minds much distress.
5. Finally, since like horses and dogs we are very much pack animals, we need even more than most animals a sustenance community, which will both defend and nurture us, and that in turn needs our unique contributions to sustain the rest of the human community. For many other species, days, weeks, and months are necessary for a youngster to live an independent life. For us it takes at least a decade sometimes two.
Bob