So when I was in school from 2nd to 6th grade in that school there was a sign saying to treat others the way you want to be treated. And yeah the irony with that was teachers at that school were actually quite abusive that I saw no sense in on one hand treating others the way you want to be treated meanwhile being treated badly by teachers. It might sound weird but yeah I was treated slightly better when I finally got out of that school. But yeah to me it’s kind of like how I even understand that logic is if someone treats me badly I should have a right to treat them badly. That’s basically one flaw I saw with the golden rule. If I’m treated badly what gives them the right to be treated any better? This whole golden rule idea is pretty messed up when you really consider it. If you wrong me do I have the right to wrong you? That’s really the one thing I questioned about the golden rule.
The rule you’ve described is ‘you have the right to treat people how others have treated you’.
That is not the Golden Rule. The point of the Golden Rule is to proactively be a good person, not one who reciprocates. Regardless of how others treat you, by treating others how you want to be treated, you will be seen as a good and decent person who spreads kindness in the world. Someone whom others won’t go online and complain about. Someone who is less likely to make someone’s day a little more shitty.
The Golden Rule is awesome. I struggle daily to abide by it.
No, it doesn’t say you can treat someone badly if they treat you badly. It doesn’t say anything about how others treat you having any effect on how you treat them.
It says you should treat everyone the way you’d like them to treat you, regardless if they actually do or not.
This is what I came here for. Like you said, the rule is about how you treat others, and intentionally doesn’t account for how others treat you. As was already said, lots of religions have similar rules. They also have parallels to “lead by example,” “turn the other cheek,” “vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” “judge not lest ye be judged.” All of these are guidelines for community cooperation and fellowship. There will always be people who go against them, but if the overall community adheres to them it’s generally in a better position to be stable and succeed.
The problem with the golden rule is that different people want to be treated differently, so they may treat you how they want to be treated but not how you want to be treated, and vice versa.
Maybe when you’re struggling with an issue, you want to be left alone to figure it out by yourself, but your friend in the same scenario would want someone to start doing anything to help out and insisting on troubleshooting the issue together. So your friend ends up frustrating you by offering to help too much when you just want to be left alone and then when they’re struggling, they get upset that you leave them alone to deal with it.
So communication is important. Ask people how they’d like to be treated rather than just assuming they’d want to be treated the way you want to be treated and be honest with them about how you’d like to be treated.
I think you’ve got the right idea, but may be overthinking it just a tad.
The golden rule is just a proactive step when meeting and dealing with new people. Since you can’t know how others want to be treated from your first interaction, you fall back on the golden rule. So you offer to help someone, they tell you they’d prefer to be left alone, all good. Now you know.
Basically, it’s not just “If I were in this situation, I would want to be helped, so I’m going to keep offering to help.” It’s “If I were in this situation, I would want people to be understanding and gentle, so I’ll listen to what they have to say and, if they ask for help, do whatever they need.”
Where people get caught in the weeds though is often the difference between being “good” and being “nice”, so you’ll never have an objective answer to the best course of action. Just this general guideline to hopefully steer you in the right direction until you can figure the rest out on your own.
Sure, its very effective. Someone commits a crime, everyone gets turned into gold statues. Seems fair.
It’s so-so. Treating people the way you want to be treated only works if you want the same things. Much better to treat others the way they want to be treated.
The more accurate allegory I like is tricking yourself into believing that will have to live the life of everyone who as ever lived (like reincarnated once at a time). It still means that you have to kill hitler because you would want to protect all of your other reincarnation experiences, but you’re not necessarily going to torture them alive for fun… maybe for deterrence though.
It’s the most true to the fact that everyone has the same experiences we do, we’re just numb to them. We would act as if the first paragraph were true if we could somehow tap into the consciousness experiences of everyone else. Selfishness is just ignorance
