The Fourth Principle of Self-love is seeing that fear of unhappiness is the cause of all human evil for you do evil for you think it is going to make you happy and fear is caused by ignorance. Because self-love or happiness is the root of all good, fear has to be the origin of evil as manifested by humankind.
The reason that love makes us happy is because it delivers us from fear.
If you are happy you treat others well and they are made happy by being around you and that makes you happier and feel safer in the world. The evil you do is caused by the fear of unhappiness. Since you have to love yourself to be happy, and happiness and self-love or self-esteem are exactly the same thing, it follows that if you develop a strong self-esteem you will not only feel you are a wonderful person but act it. Knowing how to be happy makes you happier for then you have the resources to make yourself happy and stay happy therefore ignorance is the cause of fear and its child, unhappiness. And fear is the root of all evil. The ignorance that causes fear is the ignorance that you should only love yourself and the ignorance concerning how best to achieve self-love. It is the ignorance that you are perfect as you are and ignorance also produces fear which leads to acts and thoughts of evil. We all fear what we do not understand and we are afraid of change because we are afraid of the new while we know the old better and consequently feel safer with the old. So that is where Humanism comes in. The philosophy is hoped to deliver you from ignorance and we are confident that it can! Our philosophy is the only way to salvation and merely knowing the philosophy and understanding it is a tremendous source of comfort for it gives hope.
Do not fight the evil that attracts you but simply see that it is a liar and promises happiness that it will not deliver. Just see it as bad and you won’t do it. To struggle with evil is to give evil power over you to inflict pain on you and to give it the hope of triumphing over you for it might win the struggle. To do evil even if it makes you happy for the rest of your life is to degrade yourself by becoming the vehicle for the origination of a force that has harmed you terribly and is against your dignity for that reason.
Love is often perverted into something that makes people harm themselves. Our job is to guide people to love themselves properly and this is the solution to all life’s problems.
