"Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts"

Max Lerner distills a stark human dilemma: either we cultivate solidarity or we slide into ruin. The verb “learn” is crucial. Brotherhood is not sentiment that arrives by accident; it is a discipline, a set of practices, institutions, and habits of mind formed through effort and reflection. The future turns on whether we treat one another as kin in a shared dwelling or as rivals in a cage.

To live like brothers is not to deny conflict or erase difference. Siblings quarrel; they also recognize a bond that survives quarrels. It means honoring the equal dignity of others, accepting mutual responsibility, and building systems that translate empathy into structure, fair courts, honest elections, public health, inclusive economies. It is the understanding that liberty without solidarity corrodes, and solidarity without liberty suffocates; a healthy society needs both.

The alternative is a descent into a world organized by fear, resentment, and domination, a life-and-death scramble where the strongest prevail briefly and everyone ultimately loses. “Beasts” signals the surrender of reason and conscience to appetite and aggression. The death Lerner warns of is physical, yes, war, famine, ecological collapse, but also moral: the hardening of hearts, the normalization of cruelty, the loss of shame.

Brotherhood must be learned because our instincts are mixed. We are capable of care and of cruelty. Education, cross-cultural contact, honest history, and the practice of listening can widen our circle of concern. Justice makes solidarity durable by ensuring that care is not selective and that power answers to principle. This is not a call to sentimentality; it is a demand for grown-up cooperation enforced by law and animated by compassion.

The line still presses on us: polarized politics, disinformation, climate stress, mass displacement, pandemics, nuclear risk. Every day we choose the curriculum of brotherhood or the reflex of the pack. Survival is a cooperative art. Our future depends on enlarging the sense that strangers are not enemies but relatives we have not yet met.