Leonard Read, Session 1, Part 2: A Return to Goodness
“No wind makes for him who has no destined port.”
We have just begun the newest set of sessions at Mindset Shifts U.
In her book, Our Last Innocent Moment, philosopher and ethicist Julie Ponesse writes,
Like different tribes who inhabit the same country and are subject to the same laws, we have wildly different views about what it is to be good… We are a people adrift in a historical no-man’s place, “unmoored” as Brett Weinstein poetically but hauntingly said. We are orphans of history, of liberty, and even of our own sense of conscience.
Leonard Read would not be surprised to find us so utterly unmoored. Already, at the time of his writing, he observed that while people were “awakening to the fact that things are amiss,” in their “frenzied search for explanations, causes, reasons” they looked outside themselves, blaming other people and circumstance, “without any noticeable confession of personal shortcomings.”
A fundamental mindset shift supports the dismantling our misguided habits. In a post leading up to this session, I quoted from Read’s book Students of Liberty as he observed how we subvert the principle of love:
It is not necessary to make the case for the principle of love. Most persons will contend that it is the principle we ought to practice, but that it is impractical. But try to find the individual who believes it impractical so far as he is concerned. He doesn’t exist. Each person thinks only that it is others who are incapable of decency.
By love Read “refers to the application of the kindly virtues in human relations such as tolerance, charity, good sportsmanship, the right of another to his views, integrity, the practice of not doing to others what you would not have them do to you, and other attributes which result in mutual trust, voluntary cooperation, and justice.”
In our series on Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, we read that to love another means we see “that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Frankl explained further the power of our choice: “Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities.”
To love is to see a fellow human “as a being rather than a thing or an ‘it’,” writes libertarian psychiatrist Peter Breggin in his book Beyond Conflict. Building on the work of Martin Buber and Erich Fromm, Breggin explains, “To say people are beings is to invest them with sacred meaning—with special, inviolable importance.”
Breggin continues about the importance of seeing the intrinsic worth of every person: