Why We Do What We Do

People occupy their time with a vast array of activities. For most people, work consumes the majority of their day. Salesmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, housewives, plumbers, teachers, construction workers, accountants; the list is endless. Speak to someone who is a zealot about their profession and they'll regale you with stories of business trips, accomplishments, hilarious incidents, and the sheer satisfaction of the task that they perform.

Yet if you were to ask any of them if they would be happy if they had their job and were alone on planet Earth, you'd get a resounding "no". That's going to be true if you ask someone who is an enthusiast about their job, their hobby or any other activity into which they expend the majority of their time. It's going to be true because we are fundamentally enthusiasts about the people around us. Our profession or our hobby gives us a means - or an opportunity - to interact with those people.

The most vibrant people that you will ever meet have accomplished the seemingly simple feat of figuring out how to have a role in society that permits them to interact with the most people. They have no desire to step away from society. Rather, they step into society with gusto, savoring their interactions with the people that they know and always seeking interactions with those that they don't. There are no strangers for such people.

Note that the vibrant people have a role and they connect with the society. Some connect with society and some have a role, but only the connection of the two produces the most vibrant people. At the opposite end of the spectrum are people who have neither a role in society nor any connection with people. Hermits. They merely exist. More damaging than hermits are those who take up a role, but who have no desire for a connection with society. Their actions are not grounded in a desire for the well-being of the community that surrounds them, but rather in some other ethic. They pursue some ethic that is borne of themselves. It is a selfish ethic.

Consider men like Hitler and other brutally-minded men that are infamous in world history. These men have a limited sense of community. Hitler believed in the Arian community, but no other. Other influential men and women have had similarly warped and vacant notions of community, and invariably it has led to pain and suffering for those excluded from those notions.

Believe it or not, this is a segue to Christmas. Today is the eve of Christmas, when Christians celebrate the birth of Christ. Christ may be viewed as perhaps the first human being who declared that his sense of community encompassed everyone in the world. There were no exceptions. We might reject his willingness to include us, but he included us anyway. Today, we call that ethic "Being Christian".

Modern civilization simply would not exist if it were not for the altruistic sense that leads to the idea that everyone in the world is our neighbor. We started out such that the only people that we were willing to declare our friends were family members. Then it expanded to our clan. From there, we broadened our horizons to include village, city-state, and nation. Each such structure exists only because of the shared identity of its citizens. Without altruism to remind us that those we don't know can still be our friends and allies, we would revert to tribalism. If you doubt that, look around the world. Where you see tribalism, look for the absense of altrusim. And vice-versa.

Christ was the wake-up call for the world. Christ spoke about essentially one thing: altruism. He was the one who popularized the idea of helping everyone else. Treating our neighbor as we would want to be treated ourselves. That simple formula makes everything possible.

Whether you are a Christian or not, take a few moments tomorrow to remind yourself what Christmas really meant to the world. The birth of Christ was the birth of altruism. It gave us civilization. It gave us the society in which we prosper and for which we work so diligently. The only limitations in our society are the ones that come from our unwillingness to practice altrusm - to see our fellow man as our friend and neighbor. We all have our limits, after all. Ultimately, involvement with community is why we do what we do, and when all is said and done, that's just being Christian.

Merry Christmas.