The words that change everything forever

What Western Civilization at its very best really stands for....

In this time of political uncertainty, inspired by the hope of change and threatened by the corruption of our most cherished values, it is especially important for each of us as individuals and together with our shared values to reassess what really matters in life and what Western Civilization at its very best really stands for. The uniqueness of Western Civilization springs from the Biblical assertion that we are all made in God’s image and, therefore, we should love God and love one another.

This idea that individual human beings have inherent worth and should be treasured probably did not exist and was never written down before Judaism and Christianity. We do not think enough about how unique it was for the Hebrew Bible to announce that humans are created in the likeness of God and for Jesus, many hundreds of years later, to describe love as the central moral feature in our relationship with God and with each other.

Do not get stuck on how religion has abused its own ideals. Human fallibility and evil are among the reasons it took so long for “civilization” to receive Genesis, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Declaration of Independence. Blame human messengers and human organizations, and not the divine source, for the corruption of religion.

The Centrality of Love

Living a good life, through its ups and downs, depends mostly upon being able to give and accept love, and nearly all human failures result from the inability to do so. Nearly all emotional disorders are disorders of love, and we heal from these breakdowns to the degree that we learn to give and accept love. Much if not most of what psychologically underpins our personal, psychological, or spiritual suffering is the sense of being unworthy of love. And correspondingly, becoming a source of love raises us up to believe in ourselves.

Guilt, shame, anxiety, envy, hatred, anger, numbing — the whole range of human personal suffering can often be traced to an individual feeling unworthy of love. This dreadful feeling — “I don’t deserve love” — drives most self-destructive human conduct as well as destructive actions toward others. Oddly, those people who act most grandiosely and selfishly are desperately trying to overcome their own feelings of worthlessness.

That feeling of not deserving love is often unconscious. Even if it is somewhat conscious, most of us won’t admit to the feeling out of shame or pride. Not feeling worthy of love is perhaps best understood by those of us who have experienced the feeling and can see the results in ourselves and other people. The success of Christianity is in part a testament to how many billions of people need help in feeling that they deserve love, despite their shortcomings and sins.

After we realize and experience giving love to others, to life, or to God — once we know we are becoming a source of love — we no longer feel undeserving of love. It’s a formula for success in life.

Gold represents the ultimate rock bottom value of our monetary relationships, and in some cases, it is the best reward or gift we have to offer someone. Love is the truest value we have to offer in our personal relationships, the perfect gift for us to give or to receive under many circumstances. Reason and love together will improve everything we do. Yet love is a gift that any of us can generate from within ourselves; it is limitless, and it attracts love back to us.

Each of us at any time can tap the capacity to love within ourselves and the more we live in that manner, the more we will feel deserving of love. Then we can build a life based on sharing our love with others, while others share their love with us.

Love is a Joyful Experience

My personal working definition of love is “joyful awareness” — the experience of happiness, pleasure, and meaningfulness awareness we have in relation to things outside ourselves. From experiencing romance to admiring heroes, love lifts up our spirits. From enjoying the birds that flit about us in our backyard to watching children or animals play, love brings us joy. Whether we are fully engaged and enthusiastic about nature, work, our creativity of any kind, play, our pets, or other people, life at those moments feels good. When we love God, all of life and all the world becomes a better place. Love as joyful awareness touches other people and creates more love around us.

Love is Embedded in Our Biology and In Our Socialization

We now know enough about human biological evolution to understand that our social nature is built into our instinctual biological core. We are not loosely connected separate entities. We are by our very nature shaped and motivated by mutuality, cooperativeness and love.

Unlike most creatures, we humans are born with an essentially undeveloped or fetal brain, which leaves us totally dependent upon others. Unlike most animals, we cannot even walk when we are born. Then, our brain doubles in size during our first year of life. During that time, while we are outside our mother’s womb, our brains are especially growing in response to the people around us. Our brain becomes a social organ by gaining so much size and complexity amid close attention from other people who are touching, holding, and speaking to us.

We humans are literally made of each other physically, psychologically, and socially. Nurturing in the first few years of life guides the development and expression of our social nature and our power as a species to survive and thrive. Lack of that nurturing leads to psychological and social impairments. But we are not helpless beings at the mercy of nature and nurture. As I describe in my book, Guilt, Shame and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions, we can make choices and transcend the negative legacy emotions we bring from our biological evolution and childhood socialization.

Love and empathy are key to our social nature. Across the psychological, spiritual, and political spectrums, many thoughtful people have concluded that love and its expression as empathy are the central principles of living a good and productive life. I like to take it a step further to observe that love — love of God, nature, infants, art and music, and a romantic partner — are essential joyful and even wondrous experiences. Love helps us embrace and even to transcend the rest of life. With love, the world looks and feels different. In effect, there is love…and then there is everything else. Our ability to love, as well as being loved by God or people, can help us to handle even the worst that life inflicts upon us.

Love from Adam Smith to George Washington, and Yes, to Charles Darwin

Love among people expressed as shared values or patriotism is a main ingredient of successful societies and even to the best functioning of their economic systems. Adam Smith, the great 18th-century advocate of economic liberty, knew that successful free enterprise required a moral underpinning within society. In his book The Wealth of Nations, he wrote that “fellow feeling” was required within free enterprise system in order to reduce unethical, predatory conduct. In his other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he saw empathy and love as social sentiments required to temper greed. He wrote, “It is the first precept to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our strength, so it is the second to love our neighbor as we love ourselves…”

Adam Smith had faith in our loving God, and he realized that the economic freedom he was advocating could only be sustained within a society with a shared belief in our loving God who inspires us to respect and love one another. This echoes George Washington’s firm belief, expressed in his Farewell Address, that a moral and religious society is required to sustain the constitutional democracy that he had helped to create.

Adam Smith and George Washington were contemporaries and their concepts of a free society and a free economy was most hopefully applied to the American colonies as they became the United States of America. But as both men realized from the start, selfishness and power were always a threat to the “free market” which could only survive in an ethical environment.

In our time, under globalism, the world has become an unfree marketplace dominated by global predators. Freedom, in the absence of devotion to a loving God, quickly devolves into the “freedom” of the strongest to prey upon others.

Although it may be surprising, Charles Darwin may have gone even further than Adam Smith and George Washington in seeing the Golden Rule and love as central to human success in the world. Darwin is totally misrepresented by predators on the left and the right. It is one more attempt to co-opt Western Civilization by focusing on biological determinism, which Darwin did not endorse for humans, and by talking about “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin retracted for all creatures by the time he wrote about humans. When intellectual and academic predators make themselves the ultimate source of truth — they become evil and makeup falsehoods to advance their ideology.

In The Descent of Man, his one and only book about human biological and social evolution, Darwin uses the word “love” 80 times and “sympathy” 52 times. Sympathy in that time often meant what we call empathy. Darwin mentions “survival of the fittest” only three times, once to discuss its limitations. He had already jettisoned the idea of “survival of the fittest” to focus on adaptation to changing environments as the key to evolution.

More astounding, given the misuse of his concepts, he viewed cooperation and love among human beings as humanity’s peak accomplishment. I have documented Darwin’s observations on love and sympathy in one of my scientific publications and also in the appendix to my book, Guilt, Shame and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions.

Darwin described the concepts of a loving God and the Golden Rule as the highest achievement of human history. These originated in part from our biologically embedded social instincts, he believed, but ultimately also required free will and conscious reasoning among humans that could not be explained by biological evolution. Darwin even finds aspects of moral choice-making and love in some animals, especially dogs whom he loves.

Darwin lapsed into agnosticism later in his life (but not into atheism) because he could not reconcile a loving God with so much suffering in the world. Many good people fall into that trap. That’s where faith and trust come in. That’s why I urge you to dare to trust in a loving God — and then to experience and enjoy the positive effects in your life and in the lives of people you influence.

In addition to his valuable thinking about love, I bring up Darwin because I am hoping to address all of you, not just the confirmed believers in God, but also those of who have tried lift the heavy burdens of life without turning to a loving God. For many years, I tried that myself and, for me, it simply did not work. I needed experience the love with which God has imbued our world, including me, and you, and all of humanity.

My Views On Love in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

I am a trained physician and psychiatrist, and I have concluded that the fundamental views of psychiatry, all of them based on fraudulent biological and medical theories, are evil. Psychiatric, as a medical specialty, does not see human psychological suffering as coming from our “psyche” or spirit or soul as we struggle with the pain and suffering inherent in life. Instead, it makes us believe the problems are in the biology of our brain, and then, beyond all sensible thinking, it treats the brain as if it were a cancer and destroys or suppresses its highest functions with neurotoxins called psychiatric drugs. It also persists in using electrical shocks (ECT), various kinds of electrical stimulation, and, in the extreme, electrical/surgical tissue destruction in the brain called lobotomy or psychosurgery. Psychiatry is literally hostile to both God and human beings.

Psychiatry, from its origin, has always been this way and, after a brief flirtation with psychoanalysis in the 1950s, has founded its increasing wealth on its unholy alliance with drug companies. Outside establishment psychiatry, in earlier centuries, various spiritually and religiously based forms of hospital therapy existed but have been driven out of existence.

What if we focused therapy — to the exclusion of psychiatry — on helping our clients and patients to give and to accept love more fully? Could we help them see the importance of love and how they can overcome their entrenched fears and doubts about giving and receiving more love? Suppose we acted this way ourselves in our everyday lives, trying when possible to give and to receive love, along with whatever other activities we were sharing? What if reason and love guided all our conduct?

Could we jettison all our ugly, cookie-cutter, unloving diagnoses — ADHD, conduct disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia? Could we instead help others to discover where their loving engagement with life was discouraged or lost and how to revive it or even to experience it for the first time?

In my life and my clinical practice, these questions are not abstract conjectures. From my earliest days as a college volunteer in a state mental hospital to this day, I have tried to guide people toward more loving engagement with the primary people in their lives and with life itself. I have also tried to guide myself in the same way, often with faltering and even dreadfully failing steps. Accepting God and then myself as a source of love and building my life around this ideal has made all the difference.

Love is not only the key to therapy; much more importantly, it is the key to life.

Where Does God Fit In?

Where does God fit in? He fits in everywhere. The real question is, “Where do we fit in?”

Daring to believe in a loving God, and allowing a loving God into our lives, can be the most important step we take in life. If we try to be a source of love, it will often seem that we need help in doing so, even on a regular or daily basis. The turmoil, strife and hopelessness that often overtakes us as human beings trying to make sense out of life can be a lonely place best negotiated with nearness to God.

Getting together with my wife, Ginger Breggin, made a huge difference for both of us in imbuing our lives with love. From the beginning, it seemed to us that God must have brought us together on two separate occasions, a decade apart, to make sure we would finally dare to feel and to take responsibility for so much love. But even if God put us together, we could not have succeeded without sharing a determination to make our love work. Finding love can be unsettling and even frightening. It’s somewhat like finding faith in God. It is essentially wonderful but requires a great deal of personal responsibility and hard work to make love and reason, along with God, the center of our lives.

It makes sense that as individual humans we cannot take credit for having the capacity to love. Our capacity to love was biologically given to us as unborn humans and then nurtured in our early life in varying degrees. But our capacity to maintain and grow our love is often tested and can seem overwhelming. We must set ourselves firmly on the side of love and reason, and God, in order to make the best lives for ourselves and others.

When we start to try to become a source of love, it often helps to realize that love comes from a power beyond us and in good part we are simply joining in the expression of something universal. Many thoughtful people have made the connection between God and love. It finds its initial expression in the Hebrew Bible and it became the foundation of Christianity.

Sure, it’s hard for many of us to believe in a loving God. To begin with, remember, we don’t feel we deserve love! We may feel too ashamed or guilty to even ask God for help. I believe that many an atheist’s ideology is driven by the belief that he or she doesn’t deserve God’s love, but it’s less painful for them to say God doesn’t exist at all. That’s when we need to identify that dreadful feeling of “I don’t deserve love.” And that’s when it can be so spiritually strengthening and even lifesaving to ask God for His love, or to acknowledge His love, and then to open your heart to being loved and to love those around you.

Give it a try. Open your heart to being loved by God. And open your heart to loving God and His world. Begin to think of yourself as a source of love in God’s world. It will make your life amazingly better while helping others make their lives better, too!

Also published on AmericaOutLoud.news

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