Two questions I received on the laws of Nature and the laws of society:

Question: You say that people should follow the laws of Nature. But if people had always followed the laws of Nature, they’d still be acting like they did in the jungle where lions eat antelopes, and we would never have developed our civilization.

My Answer: We have always developed according to the laws of Nature. However, now we see that if I’ll try to eat you today, then you will eat me tomorrow. This is why we have come to an agreement that we won’t eat one another. This is also a law of Nature.

Question cont’d: In any event, people have agreed to create social laws, norms, a value system, and systems of support. This is why the government was created – to protect its citizens through the social laws. How can we just throw all of this out the window now and go in another direction?

My Answer: We can do it because from this moment on, our world will change. Previously, because of our egoism, we developed in such a way that every person could do anything he was able to. We established laws to try and prevent harming one another with our egoism, because otherwise we’d all eat one another.

But now we have reached a state where our egoism has become global and interconnected, and everyone depends on one another. Now there is another, additional law in operation within our society, a law where everyone depends on one another and there is no way to escape it. Now people have to establish a new system of laws.

You will see that the old laws don’t work anywhere. They do not work in education, science, family life or social relations just as they don’t work in economy and trade. They just don’t work! We can say they work, but we feel they don’t. Only bad things have come out of all the good things we have tried to do.  According to all the research, nothing good has come out of our efforts. And that’s because the laws have changed.

In the past we were able to accomplish something in the world using these laws, such as to create some kind of order and to have control. But today everyone is looking around in disarray, asking, “Where is the control? And what kind of control can there even be?”

Today there is no force or reason that could produce a good effect. And this is exactly what we see. Obama used up thousands of billions of dollars to stimulate the economy. Where are those billions now? Nobody can say where they went. Putin also invested a lot of money in banks and trade. Where did it go? Nobody knows. But it’s money, promissory notes after all! So where did it go?

There’s something happening in the world and we don’t even know where anything goes. We don’t know what connection there is between us today; we don’t realize what it is. In the past, every person lived inside his or her own egoism, and people gathered into groups of “mafias.” The bank was one kind of mafia, trade – another kind of mafia, something else – one more mafia. We connected to each other according to our egoism and we knew how everything works. This is why every side had an attorney and we made deals with each other. This is how we worked. People defended themselves, and everyone understood that if someone broke an agreement, there is an army, the police, and so on.

Today, however, this doesn’t work anymore. And we still don’t understand just how much our laws and habits don’t work. We can’t comprehend this yet. The world is changing because the law that’s now operating is the law of public property rather than private property. You must now be connected with everyone into one whole. These are the changes we have to make!
(Excerpt from the lesson on Baal HaSulam’s article “The Freedom,” 03.13.2009)

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