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Everything at this site is based on this principle:
Many people will nod and think, "Oh yes," when they hear this. After all, it's the basis of all the major religions, and most of the minor ones too. But have you really thought about this? It's really a logical, not "humanitarian" idea, and it has many layers. Layer One: Love is reciprocal, or it's not healthy. It may not even count as "love." Loving someone who hates you is self-destructive, which suggests that the only reason to pursue unrequited love is actual self-hate. Thus, if you want to love people, you have to see yourself as being worthy of love, or you are dooming yourself (at least in your own perceptions, and that's really all that counts here) to non-reciprocal, unhealthy love. How can you see yourself as worthy of love if you don't love yourself? You have the greatest reason to love you as any person on Earth. You know yourself better than any other person. If you don't love you, how can you ever believe someone else does? Layer Two: Love is probably the most complex emotion humans can feel, and, despite what poets say, it is never purely "love." No emotion, in fact, is really ever experienced on its own, and this most especially includes love, hate, despair and faith. In order to feel love (and know that we are feeling it), we have to know what love is. That means we must know both what it feels like to love and to be loved. There is only one way to experience the emotional dualism of loving and being loved at the exact same moment, and that is to love one's self. Thus self-love is the first and absolutely essential step in truly knowing love as a reciprocal process. With effort, we can even procede to understanding love -- but that's kind of advanced. For now, let's just concentrate on feeling the love/being loved duality of self-love. For pretty much all of us, this will take time and effort in abundance. Layer Three (there are more, but three's enough for now): If we accept that "To love others, we must first love ourselves," then we must accept that self-love is a civic duty.
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