How Good are Universal Values

Xuefeng

August 29, 2019

The concepts and ideas that make people happy, joyous, free, and blessed are universal senses of values, or universal values for short. Is it good or bad to have them?

We all are familiar with highways. As long as we obey traffic laws on them, we can usually drive unimpededly. Whether on the roads in Africa, Europe, Australasia, or the Americas, as long as our vehicle body widths do not exceed two meters, we should be able to drive freely throughout the world. This maximum vehicle width of two meters is universal, but what would happen if it were not observed? There would doubtlessly be traffic jams. What if someone were to drive a vehicle on the road that is four meters wide? Of course all the cars on the opposite side would have to move away or it would be difficult for anyone to move anywhere. This one case alone is enough to prove how good universal values are and how bad it is to violate them.

Today is August 29, 2019. This is also a universal value. With this universal value, recording and communicating is made smooth. If you disagree with this value and insist that today is Elevember 37, 3085, then life would become unreasonable and communications would be blocked.

China and the United States have recently experienced some trade congestion. What is the reason? It is that either China or the United States did not observe some universal value or maybe neither country did. Either way, once the universal value was not observed, it led to inevitable congestion.

Universal values should not be mixed with national, ethnic, religious, regional, or special interest sentiments. Once a value falls under the influence of any of these, they are no longer universal. Trump’s “America First” and Xi Jingping’s “Chinese Dream” both carry national sentiments, so neither are universal values, and since they are not, they will undoubtedly lead to “traffic jams”. Buddhism’s “reincarnation” and Christianity’s “resurrection” and “last judgement” beliefs are in sharp contrast to each other because the roots of these two religions are so completely different. In other words, Buddhism and Christianity have no universal values, and neither do many other belief systems. So if there are religious sentiments in the concepts and ideas, then they cannot have universal values. Socialism and capitalism cannot share universal values either because the former cannot satisfy the capitalist (bourgeois) class and the latter cannot satisfy the working (proletariat) class.

Quarrels between people, arguments between political parties, competitions between interest groups, and wars between nations are all caused by their lack of universal values. If everyone had universal values and abided by them, the world would be a paradise.

Today, the concept and philosophy that best embodies universal values is the "800 Values for New Era Humans". By pursuing them, mankind would move toward a thoroughfare, natural disasters would decrease and calm down gradually, and everyone would enjoy happy, joyous, free, and blessed lives.