Be Good To Each Other

<p>“Man’s inhumanity to man</p><p>Makes countless thousands mourn.”</p><p>It is a verse from the poet Robert Burns. It was a favorite of Ulysses S. Grant as well as Winston Churchill, two men who witnessed the absolute worst of what people can do to each other. The line itself may have been borrowed from a similar observation by a 17th century German philosopher, who remarked that “more inhumanity has been done by man himself than any other of nature’s causes.” It also echoes some of the darker observations from Marcus Aurelius, who <a href='https://dailystoic.com/meditations-marcus-aurelius/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=each-other'>wrote most of his <em>Meditations</em></a> while at the front with the Roman army, where he regularly saw decapitated and desiccated bodies.</p><p>Our ability and tendency to forget that we are all brothers and sisters is partly what allows this inhumanity to happen. Marcus said he was a citizen of the world...yet he saw huge swaths of the population of that world as <em>barbarians</em> simply because they were different than him. He saw the Christians, with their very different beliefs, as something dangerous and unnatural. In a way, he forgot his own teachings, even as he was writing them down on a nightly basis as reminders and cautions to himself.</p><p>“The universe made rational creatures for the sake of each other, with an eye toward mutual benefit based on true value and never for harm,” he wrote.</p><p>In another spot, “Human beings have been made for the sake of one another. Teach them or endure them.”</p><p>And another still, “Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other—for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance.”</p><p><a href='https://dailystoic.com/sympatheia/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_m