The Golden Rule is flawed.
Treat people the way you’d like to be treated? Doesn’t work. We’re sensitive creatures.
I want people to be honest with me, but most aren’t. Most of us don’t truly appreciate honesty. (We pretend to, but we’d rather be treated with kid gloves.)
If I can learn from it I can appreciate it. Obviously I can’t stop balding or get shorter so personal attacks are useless. But I’m an adult. I can separate idiocy from lunacy from helpfulness.
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When I was in high school one of my mentors said something that has always stuck with me:
Throw out the Golden Rule. Instead, try what we’ll call ‘The Platinum Rule”. Treat others the way they want to be treated. It requires understanding of body language and picking up cues and actually spending time with people, but everyone wants to be treated differently so when you start to look for certain things, you can begin to pick up very easily on how someone wishes to be addressed/treated.
Fantastic advice, Kate! I love it! So true.
Thanks Kate. Maybe I’m missing it, but it seems that’s already what we do and is the essence of inauthentic relationships. “I’ll treat so and so this way because they like when I lie to them. When I tell the truth they get pissed.”
I think that we are fundamentally afraid to tell people the truth because we are afraid that we will not be able to handle their reaction. Myself included. ‘Grow a set, man up and get on with it’ that needs to become my personal mantra.
You’re right. We’re pre-judging their reactions. I think most people can handle honesty.
Also, Jennifer, sorry to break this to you but I don’t know if you’re going to be able to grow a set and man up. Biology isn’t on your side. ;)
Depends what kind of ‘set’…other biologically powerful, gonadotropic things grow in pairs in women, too, Karol. ;-) But I agree, the Golden Rule is flawed. It presumes that my way of treating others – my view, my perspective, my value set – is best for them. (We can see how well that worked out for the original inhabitants of the British colonies.) Where we struggle is in treating each other with compassion, from a place that respects you as fundamentally the same as me, regardless of where biology dictates that you grow your set.
hehe, you win the semantics game ;)
I jive with what you wrote. I can dig it, if you will. What I’m saying is, I agree.
Quote from Abraham Maslow’s Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People (http://psikoloji.fisek.com.tr/maslow/self.htm):
“Spontaneous in their inner life, thoughts and impulses, they are unhampered by convention. Their ethics is autonomous, they are individuals, and are motivated to continual growth.”
People use conventional ethical standards (like the Golden Rule) as references. (No such thing as infinite time, energy, or understanding.) Several problems with this:
1) It’s too easy to fool yourself into believing something (while not really understanding your belief). We all know people who are so self-righteous about the integrity of their ethical beliefs that they are cruel and vindictive towards disbelievers.
2) While neither time nor energy are infinite, understanding is a muscle that weakens without use. Having an ethical standard to fall back on weakens your legs.
I don’t see a problem with having an ethical standard to fall back on. We all have that to some capacity. What I’d like to see more of is people who create their own ethical standards more so than utilizing something someone else created for them. Sam Harris has written about this far better than I have and that Maslow quote sums it up well.
I completely agree with your last three sentences.
The problem I see is that even using the phrase ‘ethical standard’ creates a sense of finality, which I think is unhealthy since we should constantly be developing our beliefs. Any time we fall back on a pre-existing response, we’re taking the easy way out by not thinking in that moment. (Then again, effective people decide on things, and if something works, it works. Optimally I guess there’s a balance between flexibility and workability?)
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