self-respect. Telling ourselves that we are worthless and shitty is just as wrong
as telling others that they are worthless and shitty. Lying to ourselves is just as
unethical as lying to others. Harming ourselves is just as repugnant as
harming others. Self-love and self-care are therefore not something you learn
about or practice. They are something you are ethically called to cultivate
within yourself, even if they are all that you have left.
The Formula of Humanity has a ripple effect: your improved ability to be
honest with yourself will increase how honest you are with others, and your
honesty with others will influence them to be more honest with themselves,
which will help them to grow and mature. Your ability not to treat yourself as
a means to some other end will in turn allow you to better treat others as ends.
Therefore, your cleaning up your relationship with yourself has the positive
by-product of cleaning up your relationships with others, which then enables
them to clean up their relationships with themselves, and so on.
This is how you change the world—not through some all-encompassing
ideology or mass religious conversion or misplaced dreams of the future, but
by achieving the maturation and dignity of each individual in the present, here
and now. There will always be different religions and different value systems
based on culture and experience; there will always be different ideas about
where we’re going and where we’ve come from. But, as Kant believed, the
simple question of dignity and respect in each moment must be universal.
The Modern Maturity Crisis
Modern democracy was invented under the assumption that the average
person is a selfish and delusional piece of shit, that the only way to protect us
from ourselves is to create systems so interlocking and interdependent that no
one person or group can completely hose the rest of the population.
Politics is a transactional and selfish game, and democracy is the best
system of government thus far for the sole reason that it’s the only system that
openly admits that. It acknowledges that power attracts corrupt and childish
people. Power, by its very nature, forces leaders to be transactional.
Therefore, the only way to manage that is by enshrining adult virtues into the
design of the system itself.
Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, guarantees of privacy and of the
right to a fair trial—these are all implementations of the Formula of Humanity
in social institutions, and they are implemented in such a way that they are
incredibly difficult to threaten or change.
There’s really only one way to threaten a democratic system: when one
group decides that its values are more important than the system itself and it