By Victor M Fontane
In his book Freedom, The End of Human Condition explains:
For human civilization to survive, selflessness had to become the driving force in the world; ultimately, there had to be’ ‘change of heart’. Yes, as many people have pointed out over the years, ‘it’s not that humans lack the ability to fix the world, it’s that they lack the will’, the ‘change of heart’, the preparedness to live selflessly.
So despite its precious contribution to the human race’s progress towards finding understanding of ourselves, the ultimate truth is that selfishness, especially insatiable materialistic, capitalistic greed, was poised to destroy the world. It was ‘insatiable’ because, as an artificial form of reinforcement, materialism was never going to genuinely make us feel we were good and not bad—only understanding of our fundamental goodness could and now does achieve that. The celebrated leader of Indian nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi, was making this point about the insatiability of trying to make ourselves feel good by surrounding ourselves with material luxury when he famously said, ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.’
The story of Lei Feng, a hero during China’s cultural revolution, provides an example of the satisfaction and excitement and meaning that can be gained from selflessly serving the larger whole. As has been emphasized, communism was an extremely dangerous false start to the human-condition-free world but, nevertheless, we can learn from Feng’s actions. During Mao Tse-tung’s cultural revolution (which took place between 1966 and 1976), a Chinese newspaper published the posthumous diary of one of its readers, Feng, a young communist soldier whose job it was to sweep one of the city’s streets. The diary proved so powerful it was printed as a small book that was eventually circulated throughout China and the rest of the world. The gist of the diary was that Feng was happy doing his job because he saw himself as a cog in a giant machine, instrumental in helping the whole machine to work. He wrote, ‘A man’s usefulness to the revolutionary cause is like a cog in a machine. Though a cog is small, its use is beyond estimation. I am willing to be a cog’ (The Australian, 7 Mar. 1987). In essence, Feng wrote to tell the satisfaction he felt at being able to serve. Serving is our original, natural way of behaving, and now that it has become the legitimate and responsible way to behave, it can again become the great joy in everyone’s life.
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