I try to be kind and helpful through my days, as far as I can. Walking through a coastal village in Yorkshire, myself and a friend came across a man on his own carrying family gear up to his rental property high in the village. Without much thought, myself and my friend offered to help him and after some slight resistance he accepted our offer of help. Soon we had all of his gear up to his house. He was grateful for our assistance and we were happy to have helped.
Inside us all we, or the most of us, have an embedded, instinctive desire to look after and help others. `Perhaps this most obviously comes across for the many of us with our love of our children, if we have them, and our love of friends and family, but for the many of us, we also have a general sense and feeling of care for all others
While such feelings may compete with other elements of our human character and sometimes with specific beliefs and attitudes we may hold, the fact is that our obvious human kindness and sociability, our clear social and cooperative and kindly human actions, evidenced through the many things we do and observe in our daily lives, and perhaps most ably described by Ruttger Bregmnan in his book, Humankind, give the lie to the nonsense of those who argue that we as humans are naturally, selfish, competitive beings, solely out to look after ourselves.
When I argue for kindness, caring and cooperation through my facebook posts, I sometimes get such comments from posters who say things like "we are just naturally selfish as human beings". It's such nonsense and flies in the face of reality. I often feel these people say these things and use these arguments in order to justify their own personal meanness and selfishness, which in reality, they know are wrong.
The fact is that our kindly, social cooperative actions give the lie to those who argue, as do these posters and as did the philosopher Hobbes, that we are solely motivated by fear and that we live in a perpetual state of war with all others Bellum omnium in omnes.
In fact we are on the whole (though not always and not all of us), kindly, caring, giving, caring, social and cooperative and that is how we as individuals and our human social communities survive and thrive. Yes, reality is complicated with not all of us doing this all the time, and many acting destructively, acting in unkind and uncaring, destructive ways at times, notably with a large potential, from many people, to be destructive and unkind to those outside of our home groups.
Nevertheless, as Humanists, for those of us wishing to live a Humanist life, as set out in the core principles put forward in the Living Humanism guides, our concern is for the well-being of all. And it is for us to act with kindness, cooperatively and caringly to all people, all others, in support of their well-being and happiness and our own well-being and happiness too, and in support of our Humanist desire to reduce and prevent pain and suffering for ourselves and for all others.
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