I believe people think of the solution to social problems in one of two mindsets. I use the motto to categorize the two, “All for One” and “One for All”.
All for One – Is the mindset we should all move as one, together, and make change as a movement, to impact the greatest social change and fastest progress. The driving principle is social awareness, compassion and empathy. “Fairness” is the moral standard, no one should feel less than or greater than the person next to them. And hence the mission tends to be trying to eliminate inadequacy and inequality, with the action statement to help each other and balancing extremes of unfairness or inequality at either end.
One for All – Is the mindset that controllable, meaningful change mostly happens at a personal, individual level. With a premise that trying to change someone’s mind is difficult and challenging and the most efficient use of energy and time is to focus on self-improving yourself first. Another premise is that, sometimes the group does not have your best interest in mind, maybe your circle of friends are bad influences or your immediate family has a depressed and victimized mindset. But say you want to go to college and improve your circumstances, you’ll need to almost ignore or maybe sometimes cut off these influences just so that you could get yourself better. And at the same time, you, yourself wouldn’t be able to help them “get better’ because you don’t have the experience or wisdom to help them when you’re just learning how to improve yourself, but they’re also not at a place to hear you, change their mindset or even listen to your advice.
The true “One for All” mindset is that once you can learn the improvement, development skills, and get to a certain place in life, you would be able to share that with the people around you, indirectly or directly, organically or organizationally. But also that really only the people ready, willing and want to hear it would listen and a lot of the time that’s not for everyone at that particular time. Everyone is at a different place in their own particular journey. That is how One moves for All. For example, when a person pulls themselves out of destitution to run a business, doesn’t have to be a big corporation to make a difference, a small business now employing a dozen people, that’s a dozen family’s living in homes, 36-48 people eating meals, 24 children going to college. And these family’s can support other small businesses and community by using their products and services. Or when someone who’s overcome struggles and an impoverished mentality, they come back to directly give back to their community, with education, mentorship, support.
But I think a lot of the times, people in the “One for All” mindset get stuck in a “One for One” mentality and forget or don’t know how to transition to “One for All”. They’ve been in that mindset for so long, the lonely grind of just pushing themselves to get better, cutting off anyone around them that doesn’t help them get better or might pull them down. Maybe scared of falling back, failing, losing it all.