By Dr. John F. Sase Gerard J. Senick, senior editor
Julie Gale Sase, copyeditor
"I want a kinder, gentler nation."
-George H. W. Bush, 41st President of the United States, 1988
"Make America great again!"
-Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States, 2016
The professions of Law and Economics cannot be separated from ethics - right and wrong, fairness, and equality. These are ageless and universal. However, we live in a divided society of extreme poverty and wealth, conservatives and liberals, and citizens and immigrants. What we call ethics has its basis in ancient philosophy and religion.
The above-excerpted quotes from presidential speeches have become platitudes. By themselves, they are solid ideas. However, how do we accomplish the goals that are inherent in these statements? Perhaps an answer is in the following, which comes to us from a variety of sources. The earliest that we have reviewed is the ancient text known as "Dharma," which means "more than a code of law," and has been followed by such sects as Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs. More than 4,000 years ago, ancient China, Egypt, and India provided their concepts of truth, law, morality, and justice.
More recent sources include: the Ten Commandments as delivered by Moses more than 3,500 years ago; the philosophy, law, and ethics of ancient Greek philosophers along with the teachings of Jesus from more than 2,000 years ago; the preaching of Muhammad, who presented and confirmed the teachings of Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus approximately 1,400 years ago; and the words of Nicholas Black Elk, a Lakota holy man ("Black Elk Speaks," by John G. Neihardt, Morrow, 1932).
Furthermore, we find more contemporary syntheses of these concepts in various modern works that include "Think and Grow Rich" (The Ralston Society, 1937) by Napoleon Hill, who received his basic information from the 19th-Century American Industrialist and Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and "Be a Mensch" (Vector Press, 1990) by Henri Lewin who was born into a world of comfort and opportunity, but fled Germany at a young age along with his family in order to escape persecution experienced under Nazism.
What I (Dr. Sase) have attempted to provide in this month's column is a new synthesis for the 21st-Century, one that I have based on sources that include the above ones. In previous articles in the Legal News, I have introduced the concept of developing a sustainable economy with sufficient affluence for all. The economics of this involves more than opening old trusts that were set aside by a preceding generation with the purpose and intent of maintaining employment and an adequate economic base. Building a sustainable economy requires more than just the reinvestment of accumulated wealth. We cannot reach this goal unless we have a strong platform for humane economics. Our task requires the work and commitment of everyone in order to achieve this goal, from the local to the global level.
I am introducing this concept now because it fits into the context of current events, which are eroding our society, our democracy, and our international relations. At this time of year, many cultures celebrate the various Festivals of Light as well as the inherent goodness of humanity. Therefore, we have chosen to address this Lesson Plan for Moving into the Future Successfully. I have taken more than three dozen positive actions and have organized them into seven sequential Growth Exercises: The Inner Preparation of Self, Preparing for the Outer World, Interaction with Others, The Larger Community, The Higher and Wider Social Level, In Respect to Ecology and the Environment, and The Highest Level of Consciousness. Once we introduce the heading, the reader is invited to participate in each exercise, which leads the participant from the base that exists within us as individuals to a peak of the ultimate level of consciousness.
The Inner Preparation of Self
- Balance emotions: Our emotions play key roles in achieving happiness, success, and lasting relationships as well as in the aging process. The ability to remain emotionally intelligent keeps our nervous systems in balance and ensures that our immune and other systems can repair and preserve our bodies.
- Practice humility: We learn from our experiences. By admitting our own mistakes, we move closer to the ideal of humility. We avoid taking credit for an accomplishment. We praise others and help them to succeed.
- Be worthy of trust: Being trusted is a greater good than being loved. The ability to be trusted by others requires that we be knowledgeable and well-informed. Only then, we humans can be trusted to govern ourselves.
- Follow inner guidance: When feeling lost or confused, we instinctively search for direction. In order to accomplish this, we turn to the inner self. In this space, our inner guidance flourishes because we can listen to wisdom without judgment.
- Keep our own counsel: We should maintain discretion, circumspection, and care in what we say to others in respect to our thoughts, deeds, or situations. This practice extends to keeping the appropriate secrets of others in confidence.
- Live in truth: Truth brings us to wholeness and higher, clear consciousness. Following deceptive paths only offers false riches. Superficial success merely leads to the inner death of our humanity.
- Make genuine offerings: Out of our concern for others and the world around us, sincere giving produces a genuine effect in the lives of all.
Preparing for the Outer World
- Honor virtue: In essence, virtue is the Golden Rule by which we will not do to our fellow humans that which is hateful to ourselves. Virtue is good manners, hope, justice, and temperance, to name but a few.
- Esteem purity: We regard purity in respect to what frees us from anything that debases or pollutes us or our environment. Purity suggests freedom from evil, guilt, or inappropriate elements that could contaminate our lives.
- Be trustful: In our relationships, trust forms the foundation for building strong bonds and serves as the essential ingredient in any healthy relationship. Therefore, we define trust by honesty and dependability.
- Converse with awareness: In order to master this art, we must develop empathy. If we fail to emphasize the development of our awareness of self and those around us, we cannot leverage our previously untapped personal qualities.
- Remain open to love: This spectrum of love includes all forms of human experience. We may strive for the love that is the sacrificing friendship that develops between brothers in arms who have fought side by side on the battlefield. This quality parallels the kind of love that parents and their children embody toward one another in their desire to save the other from harm. Furthermore, we may strive for a selfless love that extends through all people by practicing patience, caring, and deep understanding of humanity.
Interaction with Others
- Be peaceful: Peace of mind prevents stress and anxiety in our lives by making our minds calm. Furthermore, peace awakens our inner strength and confidence and helps us to connect better with those around us.
- Be kind: Kindness serves as an attractor by which others seek us out. When we show kindness to others, it makes them happy. As a result, the more that we can show kindness to others, the more that happiness will be in our lives.
- Be accepting: Acceptance requires that we be cognizant of a situation, without attempting to change it or to protest it. Self-acceptance means that we acknowledge and love ourselves as the people we are. Accepting, appreciating, validating, and supporting who we are in the moment thus becomes an inner agreement.
- Be forgiving: Forgiveness is the intentional and voluntary process by which victims change feelings and attitudes in respect to an offense. Through forgiveness, we learn to let go of negative emotions such as vengefulness and to develop the increased ability to wish the offender well. Our refusal to forgive does not empower us; rather, it enslaves us.
- Act with respect: When we treat everyone whom we encounter with respect and courtesy, we help to keep society running smoothly. This act includes being respectful to people who are different from us, even if we do not understand them very well.
- Share fairly with one another: The world contains scarce resources that spread across our planet to greater or lesser degrees of equanimity. A fair share is marked by impartiality and honesty that reflects the economics of freedom from prejudice, favoritism, and unfair self-interest.
- Respect others: Along with the rights and property of others, respect is fundamental for getting along with one another. Through the harmony of positive interaction and respect, all of us may feel valued, safe, and more secure.
- Speak positively: In speaking of others, negative attitudes and conversations act like diseases that devour the essence of being, both of others and in ourselves. When directed within a group, positive-speak helps to unite while negative-speak alienates and destroys.
- Speak sincerely: When we know right from wrong, sincere speech helps us to do what we say while avoiding the opposite. Speaking with sincerity constitutes a bold, though arduous, path to moral perfection.
- Speak with good intent: We live in a communication-saturated world. As a result, the majority of messages that we send are misinterpreted, misunderstood, or simply disregarded. Effective human beings require effective communication. Speaking less, but with good intent, often results in words that have a greater impact.
The Larger Community
- Offer words of good intent: In situations of great struggle, words of good intent include addressing those whom we are confronting as brave, enduring, honorable, sincere, and loyal to their cause. We should offer terms that we would want others to say to us in such situations.
- Advance by our abilities: Periodically, we contemplate our accomplishments and further develop our integrity. We do the latter if we view our lives up to that time as successful. However, if we view our lives as unproductive or unaccomplished in important ways, we may develop a dissatisfaction that can lead to depression and hopelessness.
- Achieve with integrity: Integrity serves the maintenance of identity. As such, the virtue of integrity serves a moral purpose. Our value systems provide frameworks within which we act consistently and expectedly.
- Give gratitude that affirms: We benefit from gratitude as an affirmation of goodness in the world and the benefits that we have received. We acknowledge other humans and higher powers that help us to achieve this goodness.
- Relate to one another in peace: Such action forms the path to freedom and happiness among people. When nations cooperate willingly in a way that prevents warfare, we sense the hope for world peace.
- Invoke laughter: Humor heals. The gesture of human laughter may have begun as one of shared relief at the passing of danger. Laughter may indicate trust in our companions. Also, it may diminish the suffering that we experience from traumatic losses.
- Spread joy: Joy fills the hearts of all who encounter it. A smile, a gentle word, or the smallest act of caring can turn around a life while creating a cycle of goodwill.
- Give blessings: Bestowment of these infuse us with a higher will and a universal consciousness. We associate blessings with a deific experience of goodness that flows from a cosmic wholeness.
- Do good: Ultimately, each of us develops our code of ethics that extends beyond our dedication to specific ideologies or sets of rules. Doing good thus constitutes all actions that we find as more complicated than just being compassionate. Also, doing good involves offering honest and helpful support to other people.
The Higher and Wider Social Level
- Engage in compassionate communication: Such communication helps us to create vibrant relationships that we base on mutual respect and goodwill. By speaking honestly, we transform criticism and blame into understanding while breaking patterns of thinking that lead us to anger and depression.
- Be objective to all opinions: When listening to opposing opinions, we may reflect judgments, viewpoints, or statements about subjective matters. An opinion supported by facts becomes an argument, although different individuals may draw opposing opinions from the same set of facts. However, facts may support one opinion better than another. Therefore, we consider collective or professional opinions as those that meet higher standards as they substantiate the opinion.
- Create harmony: In peace, we find more than the absence of war. Peace constitutes harmony. By focusing on the complete harmony of thoughts, words, and deeds, everything will be well through the purification of thought.
- Preserve freedom of speech: The security of the world depends on freedom of speech and on the freedom of the media through which we communicate. When we permit its free expression, truth can resist the force of uninformed public opinion.
- Achieve a focused and transparent unity: Focus, preparation, transparency, and continued determination allow us to achieve our best in the world. We need to remember that political character does not affect unity when it remains transparent. Therefore, we need to be willing to invite others to join us as one.
In Respect to Ecology and the Environment
- Care for the planet on which we live: When we care for the Earth, we need to remember that we have dominion but not control over it. We have neither the moral right nor the technical ability to exercise complete regulation or exploitation of our planet. As the dominant species, we have the responsibility to guard, to protect, and to serve as stewards of the Earth.
- Honor animal, vegetable, and mineral: We need to respect all elements of nature because of their inherent value and equality. As humans, we seem to have forgotten our place in the food chain and our responsibility for the dominion that we once practiced on this planet. Ethical stewardship involves protecting our planet from unnecessary exploitation and suffering.
The Highest Level of Consciousness
- Respect all sacred sites: We recognize that there are many paths to higher truth and consciousness. Our ancestors recorded the wisdom of the ages at places where they sensed that the divine and human worlds interact. Since ancient times, most humans have respected these sites. Currently, there have been situations in which these sites have been destroyed or desecrated. We must continue to respect these places and to keep them intact.
- Praise the deity: Whatever we may perceive as a deity from many varied vantage points, it provides recognition of the All that resides within us and beyond us. As described in ancient teachings, the All is more complex than simply the total of the universe. In modern studies, we refer to this mystery as Synergy. Though we experience life on Earth within bounded time and space, our moment and place rest within unbounded eternity and infinity.
- Affirm sacredness: Universal life is sacrosanct. Everything within the experience of life interconnects. Spirituality, Law, and Economics intertwine. Indigenous people refer to this belief as "the Earth Ethic." When we recognize that the Air, the Earth, and the Seas are sacred, we become one with the All.
- Embrace the all: A Hermetic maxim states, "While All is in the All, it is equally true that the All is in All." By embracing the All, we accept the Absolute, the Creator, the Deity, and the Great Spirit as one.
Our seasonal wish
We hope that this discussion of human ideals edifies our readers and provides a valuable resource for the end of this year and the beginning of the next. We thank the staff of the Legal News for hosting this column for twenty years. Finally, we wish joyful holidays as well as a healthy and prosperous New Year to our readership.
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Dr. John F. Sase has taught Economics for three decades and has practiced Forensic and Investigative Economics since the early 1990s. He earned an M.A. in Economics and an MBA at the University of Detroit and a Ph.D. in Economics at Wayne State University. He is a graduate of the University of Detroit Jesuit High School. Dr. Sase can be reached at 248-569-5228 and by e-mail at drjohn@saseassociates.com. You can find his Economics videos of interest to attorneys at www.youtube.com/saseassociates.
Gerard J. Senick is a freelance writer, editor, and musician. He earned his degree in English at the University of Detroit and was a supervisory editor at Gale Research Company (now Cengage) for over twenty years. Currently, he edits books for publication and gives seminars on writing and music. Senick can be reached at 313-342-4048 and at www.senick-editing.com. You can find some of his writing tips at www.YouTube.com/SenickEditing.
Julie G. Sase is a copyeditor, parent coach, and empath. She earned her degree in English at Marygrove College and her graduate certificate in Parent Coaching from Seattle Pacific University. Ms. Sase coaches clients, writes articles, and edits copy (royaloakparentcoaching.com).
Published: Wed, Dec 19, 2018
