your-god-is-too-small May. 2016 | Page 83

More bollocks. Where does this idea originate? Nietzsche would tell you that it is part of your slave mentality, indoctrinated into your culture from Christianity. It assumes that you have no control over how other people in the future will treat you. So you grovel, helping one and all in the lame hope that they will aid you when you are incapable of helping yourself. Elites in our societies do not follow this rule at all, and this is indelibly evident in our world. By and large, the rich and privileged do not want to help the poor. If they really did, then they wouldn’t be so rich, would they? Indeed, the economic equivalent to this moral precept of human equality, which is what the Golden Rule is all about in its essence, was most thoroughly developed by Karl Marx and formed the basis of the somewhat unjustly marginalized communist economic concept. The problem with communism arguably was that greed and corruption could not be expunged as intrinsic human characteristics. But today’s perception of retirement and investment funds corresponds well with Marxist doctrine, as it gives the workers a financial stake – if not control - in the enterprise capital. Many other facets of globally accepted Western economic practice, such as worker compensation, health care coverage, standardized working hours, retirement income, also had their origin in Marxist doctrine, but it’s a rare and bold politician who would acknowledge this academically undisputed heritage. The first country to implement these sorts of reforms was the newly unified Germany under Otto von Bismarck starting in the 1870s, creating the first Sozialstaat. Even in so-called liberal democracies the powerful do not readily accept arrogance, criticism or inconvenience from the lesser privileged. If their slave mentality did not blind them, people would see that the world does not operate in a Golden Rule manner. The elites take what they want, as much as they can manage, and they do not live by the same rules as the rest of society. People in our world routinely starve, are malnourished, have inferior educational or employment opportunities, lack proper police protection or access to judicial redress, live in squalor, die from preventable disease. All the while those with the financial resources to remedy much of this just buy P a g e | 83