Humans struggle to find a simple statement of their values system or desired society, and usually after enough frustration settle on The Golden Rule.
Its most common formulation is this: “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”
The human mind being immense and powerful, our tendency is to project onto our world what is in fact going on in our minds. When we translate The Golden Rule through this psychological tendency, we can derive the intent behind the statement, which is “Treat others in such a way that public appearance forces them to treat you as you want to be treated.”
After the advent of socialization, all statements tend to divide into these two parts, text and subtext. Text is what you want others to think you are saying and doing; subtext is what you are actually trying to achieve. In social situations, most statements are justifications for what the person actually wants, even if the justification is made before the act.
For example, politicians often argue about what is good for the poor. All you need to do to justify opening a new plant, or starting a new government program, is to find some desperately poor people that it benefits. This is done before the plant or program ever opens.
Socialization also provides group coercion or peer pressure. You can be in trouble at any instant if the group turns on you, which they will if they perceive that you are not treating all members as if they were correct in their behavior. This instability cows people and makes them more likely to both conform and bully those who do not.
The Golden Rule depends on this fear. If you treat others reciprocally, as if the only issues and concerns in life with the interaction between two people in one moment, you are blameless from a social perspective. The rule disregards long term consequences or any effects beyound the perception of the act by others. It is like reality itself is replaced by human social judgment.
Compassion is a social value. It is popular, and therefore, if you demonstrate it to others (using a neutral third party, like a homeless person, ethnic minority, impoverished child or mentally retarded person) you can make yourself more popular. This is why every corporation is philanthropic and every sadistic leader gets to power by claiming to be protecting one or more of these sacred cows.
Our projection combined with our compassion makes us compassionate for #1 — ourselves — first and above all else. When we see someone in a bad situation, we imagine ourselves in that situation, and therefore we take the side of the person who is the underdog or victim, without knowing or caring to know what they did to get in that situation.
This is why the basis of all socialized morality is permissiveness. The causes or long-term effects of someone’s action do not concern us; all we need to know is that they are a human individual, like us, and they are suffering, like we hope not to. The fear of this result in our own lives makes us turn on whatever ails them.
Like most group mentalities, this lynch mob-like state has its origins in distant primal lore. Hunter-gatherer hominins are incompetent at government, so need to have an anarchistic social structure based on mutual aid. But the instant one individual becomes more competent than others, that state breaks down.
Enforcing that mutuality through The Golden Rule delays the process of the tribe separating, but does so at the cost of stunted government. It is natural for societies to want to keep growing, which if they want to avoid stagnation, involves improvements in ability which means that there will always be a caste or two ahead of the rest.
In contrast to our simple greeting-card view of The Golden Rule, Immanuel Kant offers a variation: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
What Kant means varies with interpretation, but it seems clear that he is no longer talking about individuals only. When you litter in the countryside, you’re not doing unto others, since you’re not throwing your trash on land that any individual owns.
In contrast, Kant asks you to think of a universal principle. Is throwing garbage into pristine nature something you want to have happen, or not? This question re-focuses our attention on the two possibilities: either it’s moral to throw trash into the wilderness, or it is immoral and should never be done.
Kant also allows for difference of role. A universal principle can be, “Let he who is most competent take more from the hunt.” That is universal in the older meaning in that it applies in every case. It is not universal in the modern meaning, which insists that all individuals be treated the same.
Through this prism we can see how The Golden Rule is wrong. It artificially restrains our thinking to seeing the world as a series of social interactions between two individuals, when the reality is far more complex and includes non-human objects and actors.
Kant’s sense of the universal is tempting also because it allows us to think of things much bigger than ourselves. We should act so that our actions fit in a theater of the beautiful, from the tiniest microbe to the largest historical consequences, if we want to live in a world that is logically consistent and thus understandable.
Even more, he extends morality to mean a sense of order, more than a series of smaller finite transactions. His maxim also removes the power of justification. There is no universal principle in self-advancement, or in demanding that all individuals be treated the same, because both deny the nature of universality, which is application in all circumstances.
A more complex interpretation of his rule might take into account the need for variation in life. What is most universal? The need for non-universality. For there to be victories, there must be defeat; for there to be triumph, there must be tragedy; for there to be sense, there must be the absurd.
Universality under this view becomes a cry not for conformity, and the “interchangeable parts” nature of bureaucracy, administration and globalism, but a call for the type of order in which tragedy, comedy and triumph are in balance. The original universal principle is this type of harmony.
That is too complex for many people, and against the wishes of the fearful individual who desires control because they have not found power through self-actualization, and so we dumb that idea down until we get “Treat everyone nice, because you want to be treated nice.”
In turn that maxim allows us to continue the great modern scam of demanding equal treatment while we are not contributing a commensurate amount to the community. Perhaps it is this leak of profit that gives The Golden Rule its name.
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In a world where everyone is me, this Golden Rule makes perfect sense.
I am beginning to suspect, though, that not everybody is me.
In fact I am almost certain of it.
Damn.
The Golden Rule became popular (at least in theory) because the person with power, ability, and competence – the person who has the capacity to assist the incompetent and undeserving – knows perfectly well that some day he or she is definitely going to want some charity, too. (“What goes around come around.”) It may be some time before he himself needs forbearance, and therefore hopes that his helping of the undeserving will be remembed. An investment, you see. Nothing wrong with investing!
This falls apart when we are living in a sick, dark dungeon where we aren’t allowed to identify with our own kind/group. Indeed, we’ve been trained to think that all groups are equally deserving of our charity but forget or never knew that these other groups would not throw us a crust of bread if we were begging on the street no matter how much we practiced the golden rule toward them in the past. C’est la vie, live & learn, la la la…
In any case, I just love your article. Truly, you have a way of breaking things down (for those of us who may not be all that sharp).
It’s funny, really, how I’ve never seen The Golden Rule as any kind of ‘investment’. Rather it has always seemed ‘right’ and one abides by it because it is.
That was then, when it applied to members of one’s own tribe.
Now it makes no sense at all.
I especially like the point you make in your second paragraph. This is very true. I think we as a society have dumped so much guilt on ourselves that we are handing it all away under the precept of being “nice”. All I can do at this point is be the best person I can be, learn what I can and keep paying attention.
2 thoughts,
CS Lewis talked about a sense we almost all of us have in us, that if I give you a little bit of my orange, then when you have some you’ll give a little bit to me.
The US military tells soldiers, “treat others as they should be treated.”
C.S. Lewis probably wasn’t knee-deep in multiculturalism, and the U.S. military isn’t primarily in the business of being nice.
Adaptation is the key to survival, especially in trying times.
If ditching some ‘higher things’ becomes necessary, then so be it.
I don’t plan to become extinct, on-cue, because hordes of members of my race feel guilty and meaningless.
I plan on becoming extinct when my time comes.
Looking forward to it, in fact :)
Funny, I just commented on the guilt thing above. I am in total agreement on this. On the multiculturalism front, there are many people out there that might be close to me in blood, but are outright trash. They are not part of my culture, so this gets complicated for those that think close by blood gets an automatic pass. No way, no how.
And in case this get misinterpreted, although personally I am not into mixing the blood if you will, any day of the week I would take hanging out with someone different than me on that level than someone more similar who is also trash. Quality people trump trash regardless of where there genetics are from as far as I am concerned.
There’s an old french story. Perhaps you’ve watched Disney’s Beauty & The Beast.
“It tells the story of a young prince who had it all, Good looks and prosperity. Even so, he was well-known to be selfish, mean and cruel.
One rainy day a homeless beggarwoman came to his castle and offered him a rose and asked of him to be let inside. He despised her looks and rejected her offer and she told him not to be fooled by appearances. He called her ugly and rejected her once more but with a swift movement with her wand she turned into an exquisetly beautiful enchantress.
Now the prince was the beggar and he begged her forgiveness but the enchantress had seen that there was no Goodness in his heart. He was turned into a hideous beast ánd people turned away from him. He cursed the enchantress and all of his people.
Now the Beast had a few rough years. But eventually he managed to turn it all around. For he had spent his time tending to his rosebushes and to his servants with great care and COMPASSION.
As it turns out he was a Gentle person who had Immense amounts of Goodness in his Heart. He invited all of his people to live within the castle walls and they grew to love and respect him. Together they lived in great prosperity and the country had never been more rich.
He even got himself a beautiful wife. But then, I’m a complete Sap. ”
The story ends here. Let’s turn to reality, instead. People ARE diamonds in the rough. It’s easier to deny this and call ourselves supreme. It’s easier to call a virtue vice when we have not done the work to occupy such qualities. We turn Compassion around, and adress it to our enemies. Perhaps these qualities we dispise are the very things we’ve rejected in ourselves. What if that is so?
We judge people and call flaws where there is Virtue. The only thing that needs Judgement is judging itself, and even that is to be frowned upon as a mistake. All else we can understand and appreciate. For we were once idiots ourselves.
Isn’t it rediculous to call virtue vice and friends enemies?
Yeah, when the world is 9+ billion people and the US 400-450 million by around 2050 (not far off), and all wired up and balkanized to boot, this is what will save it all: praying to rainbows and having “hope”.
I’m actually a very decent person, and treat people fair. But as I have gotten older and actually allowed myself to feel the feelings I had inside versus repressing them because they were “bad”, I started to see some things as they are. This world is headed in a f**ked directions as far as I am concerned, and I ain’t going to pretend to feel otherwise. That said, I keep a positive attitude day in and out, and people like me for the most part. But I do try. Not all do.
To the leftist, life itself is a fairy tale.
It’s not real.
Neither are they.
It’s good that you keep a positive attitude, day in, day out, while being a realist at the same time. People generally like you, in spite of that? I wonder how you manage :)
Maybe you should give lessons!
So alcoholics and prostitutes should be let to vote?
Who and where exactly? What are you talking about?
Oh, you must’ve achieved much success in turning lumpens into perfect diamonds? =))))
Why are you asking me about prostitutes and alcoholics? I don’t think they are in any position to decide anything. There may be exceptions, but I speak in general. I’m as politically impartial as anyone you’re likely to meet. There’s no political position except a soft spot for the original pirate party as I knew it from years ago. I am not left nor right.
People have their say in their own life, few are fit to rule it and certainly no nation. A man doesn’t know how to be a man, a father does not know how to be a father and a king does not know how to be a king. They just are, and hope no one finds out they’ve got no clue. But politicians believe they know how to do it. They are just alcoholics and prostitutes on average, in that they’ve got no say.
Who and where? I’d say everyone everywhere. That Exactly, is the case. It is a case with Brett, and with me, and everyone else. Who and where are not important, only that we see it and tend to what we find. Pulling weeds out. Furtilize the soil, have your roses grow and blossom. Brett produce a lot of posts and with spirit but I find too much opinion. His work could be much greater and produce much more. That is what I support. Right make no sense.
I’ve had no success yet. I am trying very hard, fighting and supporting, to show Brett and the people posting here not to be blinded by politics. To doubt their very own politics. I’ve given up on discussing them. Long ago. I thought this place could be different but it wasn’t. Politics is a field outside and separated from the problem-areas. It is very easy to complain and keep complaining about societal issues, it can go on a life-time, but what’s the point? Just so you can get angry about it and spread anger about while not tending to real issues? People are so justified in their anger and I know this myself but it is simply ridiculous.
Personally, I could give a rats arse in regards to politics, at least as it is practiced in the US. If anything, I appreciated those on both sides that actually want to solve problems and not demonize the other side.
As far the whole liberal versus conservative thing that gets tossed around here. I don’t even care about that. I don’t identify with either. I am here to explore ideas, to take in concepts and see how they gel and feel, to come to my own conclusions. There isn’t a lot of this kind of dialog out there, and that it goes against the PC grain that has been so indoctrinated into everything I personally find refreshing.
Eric
Perhaps you’d be interested to know the original Pirate Party is or used to be something very similar to Amerika. They both strive for a peaceful cultural revolution, spreading it by the means of modern technology.
It is like Amerika in that it spreads to people bottom up, something like a people movement. There is much honesty there also, it spreads a certain spirit around to create blogs and bring out the truth about our down-fall. They’ve done much to aid spreading of honest information, aiding wikileaks and giving bandwidth to various people, sources. Very politically incorrect.
I’ve called Brett many things, even a socialist, but most of all I feel I can call his conservatism a very similar thing to the pirate movement. The main difference is this:
Amerika wants to go back in time and change into old ways, saying it used to work and to bring back values for management.
TPP wants to change a not functional politics into a new modern one. Saying we have to adapt or die out like dinosaurs.
Both believe in some sort of collapse. One goes back in time, one forwards. Having considered it, I believe both could work. I’m inclined to side slightly with going forward. With evolution.
Change is change, whether it’s going forwards or backwards in time. This whole Amerikan vision is about a possibility even though Amerika speaks against change and possibilities. I find that a bit odd, but whatever. I like how you keep an open mind.
It’s what you see around yourself – in your particular rotten society – and inside yourself. But it’s not true for _all_ societies, _all_ people and _all_ times.
You’re a cosmetologist with a pimpled face.
No one is blinded by politics here.
Perhaps you’re right. That’s a political joke. You are very serious.
Brett, once again your essays hit the nail on the head.
I find myself more and more day-dreaming about growing up in the generation my father did in Melbourne, Australia in the 60s. Simple family living, traditional or rather ‘normal’ gender roles, clear separation of what was appropriate in private versus in public, holidays by the beach and living in a modest home in a suburb surrounded by other people of similar culture and beliefs living with similar values as you.
You can hear the resignation with which people of my father’s generation speak about their childhoods; there was something simple and innocent there which has now been destroyed.
Our former Labor Prime Minister once contrasted cosmopolitan elites (defending them) against ‘people of the monoculture; of the old Australia… The people who knew their place’ (http://ozconservative.blogspot.com.au/2008/02/is-that-all-australian-is.html).
I don’t blame anyone but ourselves. We trusted our leaders, not to be perfect or even incorruptable but to reproduce the conditions for family life as good if not slightly better than the generation before. This was the unspoken compact that allowed a young man without a prior job to be elected by working-class constituency to parliament in his mid-20s. That young MP mistook that trust as an endorsement of his own narcissism. He embarked – not without antecedents, facilitators or successors (who we also trusted) – on a course of radical change that would bit by bit dismantle Old Australia. The end goal was never advertised as such – perhaps it was but you would have had to be listening in closer than 95% of the populace. We continued to vote them into power as we gradually became accustomed the the fact that neither side believed in ‘Old Australia’ – the only Australia we had known and cared about. Politics is now a bitter symbolic battle over the cultural artefacts of that change from the 70s on. You can vote for the traditional community-minded family man or the feminist childless lawyer but bitterness masks over the fact that the battle has been already been run. Old Australia is dead and even the symbols of it don’t believe in it anymore.
Comment of the month goes to you :)
Well told.
To clarify, it was the spirit of narcissism that resulted in our undoing. The idea that we had unique insight that previous generations did not have or were too compromised to utilise, which justifies the trashing of the old order. The Australian public had never seen anything like it before and therefore could not recognise it.
I take interest in Paul Keating because his story is of how the ALP went from sobriety in advocacy for decades-old issues (mostly, the right of genuinely hardworking Australians to raise families in material dignity) to having all the restraint of Bolsheviks in 1917. They became a party determined to destroy Australia and its traditions while still glorifying in its symbols.
Australians voted for a working-class boy with a Celtic surname, no reason to believe he would be deviate too far from the mould of a solid, unremarkable Labor member. Instead we got a narcissist who, only forty years after his entry to Parliament, rants against ‘Old Australia’ as if it were just as ridiculous a notion now as when he went to Canberra in 1969.
Gough Whitlam, the Labor PM who came to power in the 1972 with the help of the ‘social justice movements’ and is now venerated as a leftist icon, knew what the score really was. In his maiden speech to Parliament in 1951 he concluded:
“The decline in popularity of the Government…. is due to the disillusion and frustration of thousands of Australians, particularly young ones who want to raise families under decent Australian and British conditions.”
Arts and cultural types who have written Whitlam’s history have let us forget that despite the symbols Gough never really lost sight of that Laborite ideal – “to raise families under decent Australian and British conditions”. That was the point of difference for Labor until the 1980s.
Gough had respect for Old Australia, PJK developed a secret hatred for it.
We lost it all because we were not aware that it could possibly be any other way or that there could possibly be evil people lurking, hatching a plot to change the world and not in our favour. In plain English, not paying attention.
the simplistic versions of this rule are so self evidently broken and shameless that they are best disregarded. To those who would seek a higher variation:
In what ways do you affect your soul, heart, or spiritual substance when you take an action that you very well know will affect others even if they may never know of it?
To me… access to this level of consideration for ones place in the world requires that one have a capacity for these things. The capacity to sense and process multiple levels and scales of interaction outside of oneself, strictly inside of oneself, the affects of each upon eachother where one can sense and absorb with increasing clarity and then… playing with ones internal architecture to make it more natural and efficient. The capacity to stretch ones will without it breaking so that it may bring more life into the whole body or bring more life into ones interactions without causing inefficient tension to ther parts of oneself or ones enviroment.
The general principle of the rule at its different levels can still basically work at the same time and keep most reasonable and honest people happy. Of course in todays world, where many people shamelessly try to redefine words like pain or simply cannot help themselves from doing so. Or perhaps they willfully try and cheat such rules to gain advantage for themselves. They may affect the world with their actions, but they all lose access to interacting at the higher levels.
In my opinion, those who follow higher principles such as the higher levels of this rule have every right to exhist at those higher levels without regard for those who would act shamelessly or be unaware. There is a much greater chance of fairness for people who follow lower principles then they would allow for those of higher principle.
Wherever one has the capacity to improve the world through secret merit, one should. Interaction with lower level principles such as getting credit for doing good should be avoided. Doing enough secret good in the world for higher principled reasons is a good way to fight the shamelessness of the lower level principles.