Sincerity the Root of Action and Goodwill
The next thing to consider is what is to be the central aim of our action. I would answer if asked this with a single word: "Goodwill." Action is the practice of goodwill in its deepest sense.
Goodwill is grounded in the sense of justice and issues from complete sincerity. The sincere man is necessarily conscious of goodwill and he is necessarily possessed of the moral courage required to practice it. The ancients said "there is completeness in sincerity," and again, "where there is not sincerity there is a void." The place of sincerity in human life is indeed like that of energy in the atom, the structure of which would collapse without it. If a man's life lacks "ardent sincerity," he will likewise be powerless to form and manifest the three key-virtues of judgment, goodwill, and courage. And without the strength to be derived from those virtues, the Three Principles of the People can make no headway. Only by action inspired with perfect sincerity can the splendid truths of those Principles be asserted and translated into fact.
Sincerity is dependent upon the sense of justice. The keynote of our Republican Revolution has been the smashing of selfish individualism and the rescue of our people from their sufferings and of our nation from its peril. To achieve what yet remains to be done, to acquit ourselves well as a section of humanity, and to explore the full scope of possible human well-being, all we do and enact must be grounded in perfect sincerity. Then the pains we take and the plans we devise will prove creative, progressive, and constructive; we shall put flesh on the bones of the egalitarian philosophy of social justice; we shall be clear as to what we think and are aiming at; we shall be able to give full expression to our true nature and faculties, proceeding in all we do resolutely, frankly, and boldly.
Action attains its highest point of intensity in the giving of one's life in the cause of justice, when death in that cause is accepted as sweet and shorn of all its terrors. "One may die in the course of willing men good, but life is not to be purchased at the price of willing them ill" is a classical teaching we may take as a supreme ideal of positive action. Action that lives up to that ideal will inevitably be revolutionary, while, vice versa, it is only genuinely revolutionary conduct that possesses the true qualities of positive action. Sincerity is the primal motive force of action. With it, a man is aware only of the interests he has in common with his fellow-men, and of none that conflicts with those of his fellow-men. With sincerity, a man acts his will to good in perfect self-possession, pushing steadily onwards through difficulty and danger to success. This is the bearing of Dr. Sun's teaching on the revolutionary movement.