Humans First

Humans first: focus on the immediate, ignore the aggregate.

I’ve always considered myself a humanist, mostly stemming from avid reading of Vonnegut in my teen years. The problem, to me, with humanism is that it treats humanity as the end all/be all of the earth. I don’t. In fact, I kinda find the consciousness of humanity an evolutionary step too far but I’m not smart enough to study that.

So what do you do when you are a humanist but don’t see humanity as the “end game?” The same thing as you should do if humanity was the end game: focus on what’s in front of you.

Like Dr. Rieux in Camus’ “The Plague,” we don’t need some grand calling to save 8 billion plus humans when there is sickness in front of us, every day. As long as we’re living by our own ideals and senses of virtue, focusing on the immediate will have an effect on the aggregate anyway! “In fashioning myself I fashion man,” as Sartre says.

We live in a society that’s been created to draw our attention away from our neighborhoods, our communities. I’m not saying stick your head in the sand and ignore international news or politics, knowledge is never a bad thing unless you let it scare you into indecision. Maybe your sense of focusing on the immediate is having one best friend you tell everything, maybe it’s holding a sign at a protest. Nobody can make that choice for you.

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Viktor E. Frankl