Mission and Principles

The Compassionate Humanity Community affirms:

Mission

We work to relieve and prevent suffering and make society more just, compassionate, and egalitarian — as we work on our self-development and how we relate with others as a model for the world we seek.

Core Principles

Respect for Equality

Everyone is created equal, with equal human rights and equal, infinite value. All citizens should be equal under the law. Everyone should treat others with dignity. No one should disrespect or control others due to one of their specific identities, such as race or gender.

Compassion

By focusing on efforts to relieve and prevent suffering, individuals and communities learn to trust and love each other, rise above fear and anger, realize their deepest nature, become whole, and nurture spiritual development. 

Community

Society requires cooperation. Achieving certain goals in isolation is impossible. Individuals learn from their peers, need healthy communities, and support each other with their self-development. Strong individuals build strong communities, and strong communities build strong individuals. 

Undo Divisive Social Conditioning

Individuals are innately curious, caring, and often amazed. As such, they seek to become better, wiser, kinder, and more effective human beings who improve the world. Organizations and informal groups can help their members fulfill this potential by unlearning society’s deeply embedded, hyper-competitive, divisive conditioning.

Healthy Patriotism 

Strong nations are needed to control selfish multinational corporations. The history of each nation is a mix of positive and negative traditions. We can uphold the positive and correct the negative — while seeking to cooperate with other nations rather than dominate them. We can identify as a member of our nation while also identifying as a member of the human family.

Freedom

Individuals should be free to direct their own lives without having unfair constraints imposed on them — so long as they respect the rights of others. Maximizing self-determination is valuable. Certain exercises of power, such as traffic laws, taxes, healthy parenting, and preventing police brutality, are necessary forms of justified domination, but we oppose domination (and submission) for personal gain.

Holistic Democratic Equality

Society can maximize democracy in every institution and every relationship. We can nurture mutual support for self-empowerment, build partnerships, give everyone a voice in affairs that affect them, hold leaders accountable for their responsibilities, establish democratic hierarchies, and avoid a tyranny of the majority that fails to respect individual and minority rights.

Economic Fairness

One way or the other, with private actions and public policies, society is obligated to assure that everyone has the means to live with basic dignity, including meaningful jobs, adequate income, quality health care, affordable housing, and sufficient food.

Multiple Identities

Human beings naturally self-identify as members of particular “tribes,” based on geography, beliefs, and other factors. But we need not be exclusive and tribalistic. We need not get locked into particular identities and demonize others. We can still see our common humanity — our membership in the human family.

Systemic Analysis

The various sectors of society fit together and reinforce each other. To transform it, understanding how our current self-perpetuating social system works is valuable. This System, which integrates society’s multiple systems into one system, is driven by efforts to climb social ladders, look down on, exploit, and dominate those below, and submit to those above.

Nonviolent Action

Social transformation can be advanced by people who treat others with deep respect, acknowledge that each individual is unique, practice active listening, make judgments without being judgmental, try to understand others better, avoid offensive labels and name-calling, and don’t scapegoat, demean, or dehumanize. Groups practicing these behaviors can engage in nonviolent direct action when needed.

Holistic Transformation

We can transform the System by establishing a new purpose for our society — to serve humanity, the environment, and life itself — and new structures to serve that purpose based on these principles. Mutually reinforcing, simultaneous changes throughout society can synergistically help us fulfill that purpose as individuals and communities.

Global Collaboration

The Compassionate Humanity Community welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with efforts that affirm these goals in other nations.  

Related:Vision: Promoting the Compassionate Humanity Community