Post #63: The Golden Rule

20 Sept. 2023

The idea that we should treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves is so elementary, so intuitive, nay so self-evident that I wouldn’t say it ever gave me much trouble—I mean in principle. Following through on it reliably is another matter altogether, as we all know…

The notion has a correlate—presented by Dale Carnegie as the golden key to all one’s interactions with other human beings—that did not sit with me quite so easily, even though I already read his classic on winning friends twenty years ago. I could see its significance, but the message did not fully sink in until much more recently, when I was looking for something to teach in a class on “Human Learning in Society” (!) with a group disinclined to reading, but still willing to engage, conditionally at least, so long as I did not overtax their patience.

Carnegie’s manual turned out to be just the thing. I picked the book on a whim, but it worked like a charm and combined in unexpected ways with what I was just then reading myself: Alfred Adler, whose remarkable oeuvre, by one of those strange cases of meaningful “synchronicity” in life, I happened to be discovering at the same time. The elements combined like two-component glue, and suddenly the principle stuck, set, and became unshakable: “There is one all-important law of human conduct. If we obey that law, it will bring us countless friends and constant happiness; but the very instant we break the law, we shall get into endless trouble. The law is this: Always make the other person feel important.”*

Of course it was hardly news to me, even before, that others like to feel important and that they hate nothing so much as being slighted, disregarded, or looked down upon. I just hadn’t given the matter the attention it deserved. To me, before, it looked like a question of fact: where I found excellence, I was certainly willing to honor it, but it seemed to me an absurdity to go looking for it where it was not to be expected, that is to say, most places. The double-punch combination with Adler proved so overpowering because it made me realize just how central the all-pervading human craving for attention and recognition really is to anyone’s mental architecture—my own included—and how we all construct our sense of self in the world largely around promises of personal prominence by whatever measure is at hand, or at least the illusion thereof.

A huge stumbling block for me, making it quite impossible to live by the Carnegian persuasion earlier, was the question of sincerity and truthfulness. By any objective measure, after all, most of one’s fellow human beings are not likely to have much cause for feeling rightfully important, or so one might think. And why should it fall to me, anyway, to inflate their already overweening egos, their intolerably puffed-up pride? It would just go to their heads and make them even more insufferable, or so I used to think. Besides, does not the Dhamma counsel truthfulness in all things, and does it not seek to diminish our deluded sense of self, to make us see through the great illusion at the very center of our individual existences (as if the world really revolved around anyone’s self)? None of these considerations made a policy of undue praise seem either prudent or wise, or well-advised to me in any other way.

All this was not so much mistaken as overly one-sided. As I’ve argued in my Post on Adler and Freud (#43), before the self can be sloughed off like an outworn skin, it needs to be healed and outgrown naturally; tearing it off when it is still firmly attached only makes an even worse mess. People simply need their little selves praised, as I know only too well myself, if I dare look in the mirror closely and coldly enough. The trouble with my earlier line of reasoning, then, was that it disregarded the plain realities of human psychology, my own included. It does not matter much, in this respect at least, what one’s objective standing in the world happens to be; the need for importance will be sharply felt in any social position, indeed more urgently among the demonstrably inferior. Nor does it make much of a difference whether the cause for feeling good about oneself is big or small, impressive or objectively valid, or not.

Perhaps you really do have more to offer than others, and their faults and failings must look correspondingly egregious from your perspective. I am not denying the possibility (for all that needs to be said about how skewed your self-judgment is bound to be), but even if you were perfectly correct in your assessment, it would only distract you from something much more decisive: namely that your evident inferiors, too, all of them, have something to offer as well, even if it is not perhaps very eye-catching, or embedded in glaring faults and shortcomings. If you can find that special thing of theirs and make it the basis of your interactions, both sides win; if you cannot, both lose together. And would not the very fact that you are a more shining specimen of the species—if it can be sustained and isn’t just another feeble conceit—put you under an equivalent obligation to understand things more profoundly, to act more wisely, and to bring more compassion and magnanimity to bear on your trials and tribulations at the vexatious hands of your fellow man? Of him to whom much has been given, much is expected.

Nobody says that there would be anything brilliant or benevolent about pretending a false appreciation for others while in fact thinking nothing of them. The key is to find things, however insignificant they may appear in the grand scheme of things, that one can admire and praise sincerely. These little things (and sometimes not so little) aren’t very hard to discover, provided only that one is determined enough to seek them out—and therein lay my great fault before. I did not care to look too closely, because I did not think it was either necessary or reasonable, and it is really no wonder, in hindsight, that I so often found interactions with others exceedingly trying and unavailing.

Even the admittedly tedious detective work of discovering inevident (or even well-hidden) strong points is not always required. You can make others feel quite important and appreciated simply by asking their advice or listening to them with unfeigned attention. Who knows, you might even learn something. Could anyone be so limited as to have absolutely nothing to teach, nor anyone so perfect as to have nothing to learn? Perhaps. But it seems more likely that what is lacking is not so much the needle in the haystack, if such it be, but the patience to search it out. Use a little magnetism, however, and it can often be drawn out with surprising ease.

But this is all so obvious, you may sneer. I congratulate your advanced state of mind; it will save you countless headaches and much heartache in your dealings with others. I agree that it comes down to mere common sense at bottom, mixed with a bit of compassion and higher self-interest. Alas, just because something is practically unanswerable doesn’t mean it’s easy to see. Everything looks obvious after it has fallen into place; until then, nothing ever looms so large that it cannot be overlooked as long as the right mental space has not been made for it yet. I do not get the impression, generally speaking, that we live in a world where making others feel important along Carnegian lines is a great priority for most. Take you, the sneering critic who claims to understand the principle so easily and so well: may we assume that you live by it with equal facility, not just sometimes, but all the time, without fail? Not quite? You don’t say…

At first glance, Carnegie’s approach can appear merely mercenary, as if it implied that only the benefits to oneself count for anything in the end, and that even the crassest manipulations of others should be countenanced along the way. The subtitle (How to Influence People) does lend itself, admittedly, to such an uncharitable reading, as do a few other lines in the book. But it is still a misinterpretation, for in fact Carnegie insisted quite vehemently that his method had nothing to do with small-minded egotism at all, as if it were ever good or right or even effective to go through life thinking of nothing but what one can get out of others. On the contrary, the pettily self-centered human default mode is precisely the problem: we tend to get altogether too preoccupied with our own interests, as if nothing else mattered, and we think of them far too narrowly. It does not take a saint, only a modest change of heart and mind, to spare an occasional thought for what others might want, because doing so will often, in the end, get us more of what we ourselves stand in such need of—the amity and affection of others, first and foremost.

“If,” on the other hand, “we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return—if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples—then we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.” Amen.

*How to Win Friends & Influence People (New York: Pocket Books, 2010), pp. 100-101.

Related Posts: #43, #50, #60