The Greater Public Interest and Societal Responsibility

The Greater Public Interest: the goal is to bring the most benefit to the most people possible. All policies, laws and regulations should have the Greater Public Interest as the foremost consideration. All lesser concerns are subservient to the Greater Public Interest.

Personal Responsibility: Personal Responsibility defined as acting in a manner that furthers that person’s own interests, while at minimum respecting, but more appropriately, FURTHERING the interests of the greater public interest as well. In an ideal world EVERY individual acting with the highest degree of Personal Responsibility will create the maximum benefit to the Greater Public Interest. This utopia creates the perfect state of Freedom, as each person can trust that other people are as concerned for his/her benefit as they are their own. Institutions, corporations, organizations, all can operate in the free market as each are run by people guided by the dictates of Personal Responsibility, thus contributing to the Greater Public Interest.

Human Nature: is that real phenomena that negates the chance for the utopia described above. Human Nature is imbued with such negative emotions as fear, greed, and envy, hate and pride that all counteract and reduce Personal Responsibility. It is Human Nature that requires the creation of governments, laws, and regulations. Negatively perhaps, as a way to minimize the destructive aspects of human nature, humanity developed cultural norms, mores and traditions most commonly expressed in the many religions.

Human Evolution: Each human is different, both innately and circumstantially. Each is born with a varied degree of strengths and weaknesses, physically, mentally, emotionally and in an equally varied combination of circumstances. Further, this difference originated nearly from the beginning of humanity’s existence. Over thousands of generations, this multitude of human characteristics has become manifested in today’s current state where there are rich, poor, strong, weak, educated, ignorant, principled, amoral, etc. Groups of humans—SOCIETIES—have also evolved, brought to a higher GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS, by individuals further along that evolutionary path. The elimination of slavery, lead by abolitionists, is one example of societal evolution. The higher the evolution, the higher the incidence of Personal Responsibility, and the higher the benefit to the Greater Public Interest.

SOCIETAL RESPONSIBILITY: This is the collective manifestation of the highest attained state of individual evolution, i.e. the societal embodiment of the IDEAL Personal Responsibility as defined above. This Societal Responsibility is embodied in governments consisting of individuals who represent all the citizens, the public. Such representatives, being human, likewise embody those varied degree of characteristics listed above, which hinders the attainment of the highest attained state of evolution. This results in less Personal Responsibility and a lower degree of actions in the Greater Public Interest.

Our divided society and weakened democracy is due to the failure of having elected officials who better embody the attributes of Personal Responsibility so that they act in total regard to the Greater Public Interest.

Respectfully, Rfd