from The Cynical Idealist:

Lennon believed that humanity could reach a higher plane, that average men and women had
it in their power to help reshape their culture in that direction if only they would recognize that
capability. He devoted considerable effort to trying to make them aware of their power.

He may have failed to bring his ideal society into existence, but Lennon never gave up his
convictions that love ought to be the binding force in society and that peace was the goal
toward which the world should be striving. “I am not in the group of people who think that,
because all our dreams didn’t come true in the sixties, everything we said was invalid.
There isn’t any peace in the world despite our efforts, but I still believe the hippie
peace-and-love thing was worthwhile. . . . If somebody stands up and smiles and then
gets smacked in the face, that smack doesn’t invalidate the smile. It existed.”

Love, of course, was an encompassing term meant to convey a range of benign emotions
toward our fellow human beings—not just affection but concern, sympathy, readiness to
forgive, etc.—which, if displayed daily, would create the kind of harmonious and supportive
environment we all long to discover. Shangri-la.

As he suggested in “All You Need Is Love,” Lennon believed that the key to achieving this
state of affairs is self-transformation. The one thing each of us can do that absolutely no one
else has the ability to do is change ourselves. While that may sound trite, consider how few
people make a sincere and successful attempt to do so. If we, too, hunger for Lennon’s
harmonious and peaceful world, we can always choose to alter our daily behavior and
choose to take difficult stands we now avoid; that is, we have it in our power personally
to impact the world in a positive way.

Lennon’s point was that the more people who can be persuaded to attempt self-transformation,
the better our society will become. He was in good company. Gandhi had said, “We need to be
the change we wish to see in the world.”