Simone Weil says we must each use our “one single and identical reason” to “try to represent [liberty] clearly to ourselves” (Oppression and Liberty, 94) as a “guiding principle” (ibid, 90) of progress towards which people of good will actively and methodically row together. But, before even that, the stimulus necessary to overcome all challenges to liberty is that “each would see in every work-fellow another self occupying another post, and would love him in the way that the Gospel maxim enjoins. Thus we should possess, over and above liberty, a still more precious good; for if nothing is more odious than the humiliation and degradation of man by man, nothing is so beautiful or so sweet as friendship,” (ibid, 94). Fellow-feeling.
Rational love. Trumps Ayn Rand all day, erryday.
Weil, Simone. Oppression and Liberty. Routledge & Kegan Paul (transl), 1958.
[Compare to the “aloneness” from the “Philosophize This” podcast on Dostoevsky.]