Despite being a lifelong atheist, I’ve always thought the biblical injunction to “Love your neighbor as yourself” was very insightful in this regard. It doesn’t say you should love your neighbor as your spouse, or your child, or your pet, or anybody else you actually have strong feelings of conscious love about.
Most of us don’t have strong feelings of conscious love toward ourselves. In fact, the emotions about ourselves that we consciously experience are more likely to be negative things like disapproval, frustration, shame and so on.
But we all (or almost all, almost always) take ourselves seriously as a real human being with real rights and feelings. That’s the type of “love” this maxim requires us to show our fellow humans: not adoration or affection necessarily, but simply taking it for granted that they are as real and important as we are.
In other words, the very opposite of this right-wing bullshit of relegating them to the status of “NPCs”.