The Humony Mindset is about how we display love, peace, compassion, kindness, and respect to other human beings.

Our Inclination To Help

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas posed an illuminating scenario to explain our innate connectedness with each other and instinctive desire to help others:

Imagine you are walking down a street on a cold winter evening. You see a beggar huddled and shivering in a doorway. She may not even ask you for money or help. But somehow, you cannot help feeling some obligation to respond to this stranger’s basic human needs.

You may choose to ignore her. But even if you do choose to ignore and walk past, something has already been communicated to you: the fact that this is a person who needs your help.

Our natural inclination as humans is to help others. It is hard to turn away from someone struggling to survive while deprived of the basic human needs of food, shelter, and clothing. We can turn away, but we cannot escape the feeling of responsibility or the desire to help (until we are conditioned by society and our prejudicial mindsets that “it’s not our problem” or “we cannot help and fix everyone”).

Nothing in our lives so disrupts our consciousness and self-centeredness as an encounter with a struggling human being who, simply by entering our world, maybe for less than a minute, calls to us and asks us to hold ourselves accountable. After recognizing others’ needs, we must provide ourselves with self-justifications for our inaction.

With a Humony Mindset, you will realize that even a smile or a sign of empathetic recognition might benefit them. These might convey to them that they are not alone in this world of eight billion people. Yes, none of us can right all the ills of the world (not even all those found in our small patches of the world). But we can treat the less fortunate with respect and kindness instead of disgust and disdain.

Perhaps the one universal right we each have is to expect human behavior from one another. Of course, this starts with each of us and how we display love, peace, compassion, kindness, and respect to other human beings.

Thanks for reading. Please share your thoughts and comments below. This article is excerpted from Humony Mindset: Change the World by Changing Your Mindset, available globally on Amazon in print, Kindle, and audiobook formats.

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