The Golden Rule

It's been a while since I blogged. I want to write about the golden rule and how it relates to reality and morality today. The origin of the golden rule predates the version Jesus' had, to the Analects of Confucius, and Rabbi Hillel a few hundred years prior. The golden rule as simple as it is regardless of whether it is in its positive or negative form cannot be applied consistently in society.

Suppose I am on a job interview. I need the job badly, but I am competing with another person for the position. He needs it much more than I do. He's going to be unable to pay his rent next month if he doesn't make some kind of money really soon and he has several kids to feed. Now let's say I get the job and he doesn't. He's out of luck. I wouldn't want him to do that to me if I was him, but I did. We were competing for the same limited opportunity and resource as we all are in this world. That is the nature of life. If I had conceded and let him have the job because I wouldn't want him to take it from me I'd be out of a job.

We can't really apply the golden rule in every situation otherwise we'd never be able to compete for anything. With no competition many things would never get done. Period. How could any business compete with another if it deploys tactics that it wouldn't want its competition to do to it? I prefer the negative version of the golden rule. Don't do to other what you wouldn't want done to you. I think it has more force than the positive version because we wouldn't always want certain people doing things to us that we would want done to us. I like getting my dick sucked, but I'm not going to suck other men's dicks because I like mine getting sucked. I wouldn't want my dick sucked by a man, so I won't go out and suck another man's dick. I think it works better because we all know what we don't want a lot more than what we do want.