If you have heard about the French Revolution, you are probably familiar with the three words liberty, equality and fraternity. Those words accompanied me since childhood, and as a youth I started wondering about their meaning. What relevance they have in our society. Is there a functional concept behind those words? Is it a utopia that just distracts us, an unrealistic dream? Many years ago I cam across a paper that claimed the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity to be absurd and contradictory, a shining but impossible ideal that is propagated only to push people in a direction where they are trapped and cannot create anything to escape the role that they need to play in a society that exists for the needs of an elite. Although I have never seen an elite, this thought seemed plausible for me and my worldview at the time. Many years passed before I was able to look at the idea again from a different perspective.
How do those three words fit together? Do they contradict each other? Isn’t equality achieved with a sacrifice of liberty? Those three concepts are fundamentally different. And we need all three of them. To live we need very different things like water, air, soil and fire. We need those things in the right balance, so that life on this planet becomes possible. And for our social life, for living together as humanity, we need things as different as liberty, equality and fraternity. Each of the three concepts has its purpose and its place. Only together they enable a successful coexistence. To have a basic structure, we can assign equality to legal life, liberty to intellectual life and fraternity to economic life. The laws of nature are the same for all of us. We want to have a free mind, freedom of thought. What is not working so well in todays world is the fraternity in the economic and financial sector. This disturbance of the balance has consequences that also affect our liberty and our equality.
Before humanity can achieve an extensive fraternity in economic life, each individual human must have developed sufficiently first. It takes humans who are consciously engaged in their development and who establish fraternity in their thinking an acting step by step. An economic life based on fraternity is realized voluntarily by the people who live in a society. It cannot be enforced by law. Most people are still on a journey to become free humans. To not be driven and steered by fears induced from the outside, by ambition or a tendency for self-presentation, by an unsatisfied need for acceptance or by a one-sided reduction of the goal of life to material wealth and sensual well-being. Only when a significant part of the people has left behind those initial struggles on the path to freedom, then an economic life can grow which puts the benefit for everyone involved, including nature, above the profit of a few.
So there is still a lot to do before the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity can have its first appearance. Humanity has a long way ahead. A big step on this way is to overcome the one-sided materialistic worldview. It is Important for our development that we go through this worldview. It enables us to fully dive into the world of the body and the sensory perceptions. And only in this world we can experience ourselves free of any spiritual influence. Here we are released into our freedom, and a journey begins that we have to tackle with our own strength and where we are responsible for the path we take. As a result we can easily loose orientation in this world. We do not understand it at first, we get scared, take refuge under the care of others and leave this guidance late or never. We allow the feelings that we feel with our body to overwhelm us. We get lost in the trains of thought in our brain. We attach to what we see and fear the change. It is a difficult time that we need to go through to become free. Observing our thinking is a good method to begin our own development and gain new orientation.