Love, Power and Justice

At Colorado State University’s annual Diversity Symposium, speaker Tim Wood discussed love, power and justice and how they relate to human morals and how these three concepts allow for the flow of love which in turn, ends prejudice.

According to Wood, “prejudice begins when we start to place value on things instead of people.  When people fall victim to materialism and consumerism, we forget that people are valuable.  What humans need to do is focus on our innate intrinsic values to care for and protect our fellow humans instead of dividing them.”

Wood’s philosophy is based on the faith of Baha’i.  According to Wood’s assistant, Sharon Welker, “The Baha’i faith is a religion that teaches that all religious systems are connected and equal to each other and that all people should be unified as one.  One group of humans isn’t superior to the other”.

The problem with Extrinsic Value

Prejudice causes us to focus on extrinsic value, according to Wood’s presentation.  In order to end prejudice, humans need to understand love, power and justice and how to balance them to create a world that doesn’t see race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.  Even though many people on our planet are hiddenly diverse, we need to accept those differences and embrace them without judgment.

To put this into perspective, love, power and justice are used to combat global prejudice.  Justice allows for the flow of love while power, when balanced, has the opportunity to unite justice with the people to allow for love to grow and slow discrimination.  With this, humans will recognize the value in each other.

Presentation attendee, Madi Sword said Wood’s philosophy “is intriguing and heartfelt, however, it seems hard in our current world to convince people all over that we are all equal.  Especially groups like ISIS who believe it is their job to force their religion on to people because they think their religion is superior to everyone else’s.  I think it’s worth giving it a shot, but it’s going to be hard to rally humans together like that”.

A Peaceful, Loving World

While Sword does have a point, Wood believes that the more people listen, understand and promote the Baha’i philosophy, the world will be a more loving and peaceful place.  As long as there’s fair justice in our governments with an equal distribution of power, love will flow and humans will finally be able to accept each other’s differences.

To conclude his presentation, Wood said, “when the power of love replaces the love of power, the human spirit will shine”.  In today’s world, it is unclear whether or not the human spirit will shine all over the planet, but with people like Tim Wood trying to preach his philosophy of unity, the world shines a little bit brighter.