Enlightened selfishness

The key to ending poverty is not a specific program or safety net initiative.

The key is simply to understand how we exist.

Most of us see ourselves as separate from one another, individuals living our own lives. We tend to believe that if we focus on ourselves or our families - and do a good job at securing comfortable lives for those we hold most dear - that is a good journey.

But that is an unnatural journey.

It is a limited, small view of ourselves and our lives.

When Donne told us that nobody was an island and the “bell tolls for thee,” he was simply explaining that what happens to one of us happens to all of us. It was what Muir observed when sharing that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

You are hitched to everything else. We are hitched to one another in deep and irrefutable ways.

The recent pandemic reinforced this interconnectedness, and it is time now to make it the reason that we end poverty. For no matter, if you feel it on a daily basis or on a conscious level, poverty is indeed part of your life.

Poverty endures because we live as if we are separate from one another. Fragmentation is poverty’s only chance at sustenance. Let’s not feed it.

The discoveries of 20th-century physics brought us deeper evidence of an underlying connectedness. From relativity theory to the life-altering work in quantum mechanics, we saw ourselves - and our world - most accurately defined by what physicist David Bohm called an "undivided wholeness.”

Any attempt at fragmentation or self-interest, Bohm stated, is simply a mistake.

A broader view of yourself and of your existence - beyond your five-foot or six-foot frame - is not an idealistic or even spiritual philosophy; it is natural. It is a more accurate understanding of who you are. It is why we seek community or, in these days when divisiveness seems to be at our fingertips wherever we look, why we seek to find those with whom we agree.

Connection is the system of our body that takes us beyond what we see in the mirror. It is what we nourish when we are on a team or gather together in a faith community or at a local establishment, or in any type of group. It is what we nourish when we are in nature, even if we see that as alone time. It is connection we are experiencing. Living in connection with everything around you is your natural “state” - no matter that the dominant view in our society has long been a fragmented one.

Fragmentation is too easy of a way to see yourself. It is akin to missing the forest for the trees, only with serious repercussions.

Poverty is one such repercussion, the result of applying self-interest versus the good of the whole.

Wholeness, it is important to note, does not mean that we should all be the same, have the same things, or even feel the same way. Wholeness is not sameness; it is connection. And individuality is not the opposite of wholeness; it is the ingredient that makes our wholeness greater. The more unique we all are, the greater our wholeness will be.

The illusion is not your individuality. It is not seeing that it exists within the whole. There is no self separate from the whole. Indeed, self-interest is simply a mistake.

Wholeness means that our compassion should be expanded beyond a small family unit and in such a way that unnecessary suffering is not something we tolerate. It means that we take action when we see people struggling.

It is unnecessary in a country with an abundance of food for anyone to go hungry. It is unnecessary for people to live in dangerous neighborhoods when we know how to build well-resourced communities.

Similarly, we know how to have successful schools, yet we tolerate having a large number of schools across this country where kids are not provided with the support or environment to learn. In every state, we see schools with less than 10% of the kids reading at grade level, and these schools are often connected to the same neighborhoods where violence and scarcity are found.

These schools and these neighborhoods do not exist outside of you. Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that the kids there are not part of your world, part of you.

There is currently a lot of noise in our days, and much of it may be telling you how different you are from someone else. Go deeper than that. Think more fundamentally about how you exist, how we exist, and how we live together in this world.

That is where answers are found.

In our every deliberation, think of the good of the whole. That is simply enlightened selfishness, and it is the perspective that will lead to poverty’s end.