It is almost as difficult to admit it as it is to avoid it. We do not treat everyone with the same ethical scale, with the same measuring stick. We are blinded by passions, hatreds and distances between different verbal people. Our judgments tend toward irregular conjugation: I do, you commit, he perpetrates. We easily forgive our mistakes while ruthlessly stoking the missteps of others. We cultivate self-love and the shame of others. The double standard is our daily evil.
The squeegee was a utensil used in ancient times to level grain measurements. It consisted of a metal rod that allowed the cereal that exceeded the edge of the vessels to be removed, thus ensuring that they all contained the same amount, without the slightest difference. It takes pulse, finesse, discipline and a sense of fairness to rake well: razing is faster and more intoxicating. The philosopher Bertrand Russell stated that humanity has “a morality that preaches but does not practice, and another that practices and does not preach.” We raise our voices and frown to demand that the rest of the world behave properly, but with half a smile we justify the non-compliance, exceptions and outbursts of those we like the most. Often, we distribute blame and apology based on desires, not evidence; of accessions, not of actions. The writer Ambrose Bierce constructed an entire book, The devil’s dictionary based on asymmetrical and sarcastic definitions: “A boring person is the one who talks when you want him to listen to you.” “An egoist is a person who thinks more about himself than about me.”
Politics is a particularly fertile ground for this divorce between acts and principles. In the ancient Roman Republic, a tribune named Licinius Calvus proposed a series of legislative initiatives that, as was customary in Roman law, were attached to his name. The Licinian laws, designed to contain the excesses of the rich, limited the accumulation of land in the hands of a single owner and protected debtors from creditors. They were approved against the indignant opposition of the patricians. Years later, the former tribune Licinius Calvo was accused of transgressing his law by hoarding more land than permitted. His greed exceeded the limits and he ended up condemned to the penalty that he himself had set as a legislator, from the other side of the barrier.
Someone condemned by his own law is the perfect image of our inconsistencies. We openly point out the abuses committed by others, but we consider ourselves an exception to the rules. For ourselves we always find justification, while we throw reproaches: nothing needs reform more than the behavior of others.
This moral dissonance has a psychological root: we contemplate reality from the vantage point of the self. Thus, the speck in another’s eye seems monstrous to us in comparison with our own beam and our own life. Inevitably, our actions—and reasons—will always seem more logical, more understandable, more motivated. We are all hurt by the slightest blows to our own flesh, and at the same time we endure like no one else the evils that afflict others. It takes a powerful exercise of imagination to correct those errors of perspective, to recognize that only from our point of view are we the center of the world. There are millions of more centers, convinced of being just as decisive; The planet is overpopulated with protagonists.
Our memory is a victim of a similar syndrome. Various experiments show how the brain retains events that benefit us, while sweeping under the rug those that we would prefer to forget. Unconsciously, in the end, the version of events that we tell ourselves is more convincing, vivid and indestructible than the experience itself. in his book The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers, researcher Daniel L. Schacter reveals the predominant role the self plays in making memories. We are not neutral observers of the world: we rewrite the past in the light that best suits us.
Enormous doses of personal skepticism—inwardly—are needed to counteract these biases and flattery so willingly supplied by our minds. Something similar happens whenever we admire the night sky and, against all visual evidence, we must admit that those small stars like drops of light are larger than our Earth. Only with effort do we manage to recognize that we inhabit a tiny corner of the universe. We call children small, when in reality we are all so small. Curiously, the verb “consider” contains the Latin root sider, which means “star,” as in the word “sidereal.” Originally, it referred to seeking answers in the stars. But, in some way, it could be understood as a call to rethink the scale and perspective of our perceptions, compared to the proportions of the constellated night.
The ancient wisdom of numerous cultures, religions and philosophies created, in different versions and formulations, a “golden rule” of human behavior: “Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” We find it, among others, in Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Epicurus and Jesus. The earliest evidence of this golden law appears in a story from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, History of the eloquent peasant, written about four thousand years ago. It tells the story of Inpu, a farmer from the Oasis of Salt whose caravan is snatched by the henchmen of a rich man while he was on his way to the market. The unfortunate man goes to report his case to Mayor Rensi, and his speech is one of the earliest allegations against the corruption of the powerful: “Nothing worse than a scale that tips, a plumb line that deviates, a just and upright man.” who becomes a scoundrel.” After the initial distrust and the string of suspicions, the story has a happy ending and the peasant, thanks to his convincing speeches, achieves a favorable sentence and recovers the stolen goods. There he reads for the first time the golden rule: “Do good to others, so that you encourage them to do the same.”
The ancient mandate, which is revived in Kant’s categorical imperative, continues to be an unfinished business today: the challenge of reciprocity. Applying the rule of treating how you want to be treated—in truth, not just on a theoretical and rhetorical level—is a demanding task. Whoever suffered it knows it.
In our time of closed ranks and fierce sides, there are no favorable winds blowing to trust those who think differently. Attitudes that are both hostile and susceptible, at the same time infringing and censorious, abound. In the face of aggressive grammars and unfair standards, which only leave a devastated landscape, perhaps we could dare to explore the recognition of our own errors and the praise of the success of others. We applaud arrogance too much, that simulacrum of strength, empty as smoke; Humility, on the other hand, creates climates of dialogue. In Kant and in the eloquent millennial peasant we find today an invitation to be more coherent and considered, to look less at the smallness of our navel and more at the greatness of the starry sky above our heads. Raising our eyes will help us treat each other better and avoid wielding such an overdose of morality against our neighbors that we end up having it twice as bad.
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