How to Live a Life In Accordance With Your Personal Values

Your tips are greatly appreciated! Upgrade at 30% offEvery now and then I feel a shift in the atmosphere. Today, I noticed that there was a heavy amount of despair in the comments and articles of people I follow.I think every now and then it's important to put aside all your fears and take stock of the real situation. Ultimately, we are in a confrontation with hate. Hatred is a seductive force that gives the illusion of power but is only capable of destruction. Hatred can take on many forms. We must be ever vigilant. We must fortify ourselves so that we can be deliberate champions of decency.Hatred is often born of ignorance. Some hatred is cultivated through lies. Then there is the hatred that comes as a result of deliberate malice.I think it's important that we separate these things into different categories or else we can feel overwhelmed. When all of those various forms of hate are taken together, it feels like we are facing an insurmountable obstacle. We’re tempted to give up.Above all, that’s the impulse we must resist.If you start to categorize the different forms of hate, you begin to perceive a passage through. We must be deliberate in thinking about the ways human beings succumb to hate. We can’t allow ourselves to believe that hate is inevitable or universal.Human beings are not inherently hateful. Instead, human beings are manipulated, pressured, or deceived into adopting an ideology of hatred. It’s a learned process. It can be unlearned.Unfortunately, we live in a society that has historically been overly tolerant to a wide variety of hate groups. This behavior has been reckless, and it has culminated in an era of widespread atrocities.It’s not enough to stop the hate that’s currently running rampant in the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. We must also look to dismantle the mechanism of hate that led to their indoctrination.Hate groups have become more and more normalized. They’re allowed to go and speak on college campuses. They've made their way into the mainstream. We currently have an administration that uses hate as one of its primary motivating forces.The power of hate can be leveraged to put an awful person into power, but it can never teach anyone to lead. Hate can only destroy. That our country seems to revere hate is a big part of the problem.We also have the Democratic Party, which, instead of urging the population to embrace a better ideology, has instead tried to draw support away from the hateful Republicans. In doing so, they’ve largely corrupted themselves with hate as well.So we have two political parties right now, both of which primarily use some form of hate as their means of motivating their base. The good news is that we have a large population of people in the United States that has rejected both parties and doesn't vote. This is the group that has essentially already rejected hate. This is the group that must be roused to participate in leading us.We are currently engaged in a battle against hate. It’s a battle for the soul of this nation. The problem is that, even now, the general population has been fed so many lies that they find it challenging to pick a side.Individuals fall into despair because they insist there are problems on both sides and that nothing they do can ever matter. That is the language of deceit. Out of a misplaced sense of fairness, there’s an inclination to say “both sides are hateful.” But that statement serves no purpose other than to rob good people of the motivation to act.The other thing you must consider is that neither the Republican or the Democratic party fully embraces left-wing ideology. This is the answer to the “both sides” argument. Both our political parties lean to the right. Therefore, the way out of our current conflict is to replace all candidates with ones who are more willing to stand against hate.We are allowed to have criticisms of both parties. We have the power to vote out the representatives who don’t serve us. Do not despair. Instead, take action.There is a humanitarian philosophy available to us. There is a philosophy that advocates for human dignity, healthcare, and education. This philosophy is found in the wing of the Democratic party that’s known as the progressives.We need to encourage our politicians and our fellow citizens to embrace an ideology of mutual prosperity that is based on respect for humanity. We must reject hate.These are ideas that are what most people truly want. If you look at the polls and statistics, you'll see that progressive ideas are popular. Until now, we haven’t been able to achieve them because the people have been deceived by hate.But they are starting to see. They are starting to awaken. Our society has been misled by the hate ideologies that are so effectively leveraged by the Republican party. They’ve been assisted by the reluctance of the Democratic party to offer something truly different. An example of this can be found in their unwillingness to endorse Zohran Mamdani even though he won a fair primary.The people have spoken. It’s time for Democratic leadership to start listening to progressives. We’ve tried their foolish strategy of making diluted appeals to hate. All that accomplished was to put hate in power.At this moment, we are living beneath the control of an administration that seeks only to hide its crimes against the population. In order to do that, they need an enemy to blame. So, as always, they lash out at the humanitarian left, and since there is only a suppressed representation for that ideology, there is no effective response.When the president takes to the stage and cries, “The left did this, the left did that,” nobody stands to defend the left. The consequence is that the population falls into the mistake of thinking that both parties are hateful.We all have to come to the collective realization that just because the Republicans are insistent and the Democrats don’t oppose them, we are not out of options. We need to demand representation. We need a political party that stands for humanitarian ideals. That can either be a reformed Democratic party or a new party entirely. But something has to change because in the system we have now, only hate can succeed.But that’s not because “all sides are hateful.” It’s not because human beings are corrupt. Our system is corrupt. It’s time that we put aside the deceits that brought us here, and recognize that there is another path available to us.We aren’t facing a problem that can be solved in a single election. We are facing a lifetime of obligation to remove our unconscious biases and fortify our commitment to reason and humanity.Right now, the best thing we can do is worry about our own personal sphere. We must influence the people in our lives. We must be deliberate in purging the deceits of hate from our own minds.These are the lies that compel us to commit evil acts, or to do nothing in the presence of corruption.Instead, we must learn to act and act correctly. We have to remove our growing sense of despair and replace it with hope.We are surrounded by lies. These lies come from the ideology of hate. They’re repeated by the president, and his administration, and his followers, and the media. We have to counter this tidal wave of violence in the form of words.I recognize that it’s a daunting task and it can be tempting to simply bow down to the lies. Exhaustion can trick us into thinking compliance is our only option. It’s tempting to adopt an attitude of denial and pretend as if the lies are unimportant, or insist they don’t relate to us.Even now, the majority of our neighbors have deluded themselves into thinking there are no atrocities going on in the world. They’re disregarding the ethnic cleansing going on in our nation through the attacks and deportation of immigrants. There are people who don’t want to recognize the genocide happing overseas. They deny the evidence that suggests our president associated with members of the world’s most terrible child trafficking organization.The sheer number of crimes can be exhausting. Yes, there are days when you have to give yourself a break and recover. You have to attend to your mental health. But once you’re feeling strong again, you must get back into the fight.Pressure is one of the most effective tools of oppressors. They want to make you think that if you comply and deny, you can protect your own sanity by disassociating yourself from the ways your inaction enables the shameful conquests of hatred.There have been times in my life when I was young and powerless and I capitulated to that kind of pressure. I did what was expected of me because I thought of it as the path of least resistance. Although it may be true that you don’t encounter as many immediate obstacles, that’s a path that only leads to personal misery.It’s tempting to believe the effort to resist external pressure is greater than the effort it takes to suppress your personal values.That’s the first deceit. If you succumb to that, you condemn yourself to self-hatred.Think of this as you go forward and you labor to resist the pressures of powerful forces that gaslight you, and lie to you, and try to insist that you must believe things you know in your heart not to be true. In the short term, yes, capitulation seems easier, but the easy path only becomes more painful as you age. Don’t do that to yourself. Hatred is the ideology of the wasted life. We have to help each other reject hate in all its forms.It can be difficult to maintain hope in the fundamental goodness of human beings, particularly in times like now when hate seems to be on the precipice of an ultimate victory. But it's also important to remember that hate destroys everything it touches—especially the people who have taken hate into their hearts.Hate is not hardwired into us. We are equally capable of good. We are all capable of caring for our children and our loved ones.We have to learn how to love and to be loved. That is our primary objective in this brief life. Our society has rejected love and embraced hate to the detriment of us all.But this isn't a human mistake. This is a social mistake. This is a cultural mistake.There are those among us who know how to lead a better life and who can direct you to a better way. They can show you the path that rejects hate and helps you empower both yourself and all the people around you. That's the path that we have to look for. That's the path we have to take.Right now it feels challenging to follow that path. But that's only because artificial obstacles are being placed in front of us. All we have to do is fortify ourselves and find the strength to listen to our hearts.Make it your objective to continue to move in the direction away from hate, towards universal harmony and universal love. Make that your heading because it’s the path that aligns with your innermost values. If you do that, it will get easier. It's just a matter of learning how to endure and resist the temptations that might lead you astray.If that happens, don’t waste time in self-recrimination. Just find your heading again and continue. Encourage others to do the same. When you feel your own strength begin to wane, you can trust your loved ones to help you along. On a day when you feel strong, share your strength with others.What we're learning right now is how to fortify our generous spirit in times of hardship. When everything else has been stripped from us, it's only our essential goodness that remains to give us hope. We have to manifest that hope into a reality and bring that reality into the world.The ultimate factor in the ongoing conflict between good and evil comes down to the choice you make within your own heart. Which path will you follow? Don’t succumb to pressure and lies. Choose wisely.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! 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