Dr. Michael Laitman To Change the World – Change Man

Why is unity important to us?

Unity is important because nature wants us to unite.

By uniting, we enter into balance with nature and awaken a positive force dwelling in nature to surface among us. We then feel positive phenomena fill our lives: happiness, confidence, peace and harmony.

On the contrary, by making no motion toward unity, our egos grow unabated, and we let division and hatred separate us more and more. Accordingly, we experience increasing negative phenomena in our lives, i.e., suffering on personal, social, ecological and global scales.

Moreover, it is important that our unity is above all divisions, and not merely the unity of one group against another. The latter is simply a group-inflated ego that serves to increase division and hatred in society, and which also leads to no ultimately positive outcome.

Therefore, the importance of unity is the importance of our very survival, and whether we live our lives harmoniously or painfully.

Establishing the importance of unity in society requires regular education and examples of unity above division. There thus needs to be a shift in the kinds of messaging and examples that we receive through mass media, the television, radio and the Internet. If we receive inputs from all these information sources that exemplify the importance and benefits of unity, collaboration and cooperation—people working together to unite above their divisive drives—then we will all start feeling that unity is important, and our attitudes to each other will become calibrated in that direction. Currently, however, such information sources are abundant with divisive messaging, and we thus see myriad negative outcomes in society.

The process of prioritizing unity in society has yet to start. Nevertheless, those who wake up to the importance of unity sooner than others would be wise to invest themselves in sending out a red alert to society. Similar to how anti-smoking campaigns grew public awareness of the negative effects of smoking on people’s health, likewise “unity above division” campaigns would aim at raising public awareness of the importance of unity, and the myriad detrimental effects of remaining divided.

The key to the transformation from division to unity is to start a process of unity-enriching learning. People will need to reach the realization that nature wants us to unite. We do not demand the impossible from people, nor force anyone to do anything that they do not want to do. We simply organize our socio-cultural influences to bring the need for unity to the center of public discourse, and we will then think about it more and more, and start wanting it to happen.

Eventually, unity above division would become as commonplace as smoking-free zones in various public places: people would simply feel that this calibration to act positively to others above their divisive drives is the correct and socially acceptable thing to do. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that at the foundation of this change is nature: that we understand how nature is guiding us to unite, and by doing so, we do not simply wish for a slightly better life through our unity, but we literally save and upgrade everyone’s lives on the planet by doing so.

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