Admonishment #77.  Resist the Seduction of Facile Apothegms and Pretentious Implications

A popular substitute for thinking is to adopt some convenient saying as a policy for action or attitude. For example, "Look before you leap." That's often advisable; but at other times, "he who hesitates is lost." The benefit of exhortative cliché is generally situational. Even the Golden Rule, mutual regard for which underpins any fair and healthy human relationship, and which by no means is facile or pretentious, in a literal application must assume a parity of deservingness between the parties. Whether or not you call the cops on your neighbor or he on you may depend on whether he has stolen your ostrich, or you his, or each the other's. Honestly dropping the dime on him raises no GR demand for any willingness to be reciprocally but falsely reported by him. Considered more thoughtfully, the GR requires that you accept his ratting you out in the event you nick his ostrich, just as he must understand that nicking your ostrich will bring the Man straight to his den. This becomes a contingency operation of the GR when the primary has been violated by theft of the great bird in the first place.

The purity of the GR also assumes, of course, no masochistic self-loathing on the Doer's part. Don't reckon it all right to flagellate your pastor just because you wouldn't object if he flagellated you. Furthermore the GR assumes no tricky motives at play. Don't predicate lascivious advances toward your comely social worker on your grotesque fantasies of reciprocity.

Obviously the GR addresses volitional Doings as opposed to accidental. When accidents occur, GR principles kick in with respect to any response, counter-response, etc.

But the Golden Rule is far from the least reliable of aphorisms and moralistic deposits on the conscience. In fact, most serve at best as ex post facto evaluations of outcomes in particular instances. If the crooked mayor succeeds in her verbal ploy to tarnish your career, forever will you whimper to those who will listen that "you can't fight city hall." If on the other hand your spirited countersuit in slander, sexual harrassment and corruption ends her reign of terror and lands her in stir, you'll be prone to boast that "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." You might also confide with a wink, in friendly surrounds over drinks, "Love 'em and leave 'em." "Pump 'em & dump 'em."

Just a word about "pretentious implications," by which is meant those little quips, moralizations, and exaggerations, often born of political zealotry and the like, that afford their authors emotional release and an illusion of sophistication, implying much but factually insubstantial.¹ To bloat your mentality by pumping it full of these hot airs from our violent atmosphere is to ensure a loud pow! that sends you rocketing wildly through the room and out the window.

1. Also included would be abuse of quoted passages. Offering itself for misappropriation is this from T.B. Macaulay: "And those behind cried 'Forward!' And those in front cried 'Back!'" Such quotations are often employed by cynics to sagaciously impute chaotic lunacy to processes or undertakings for which they have no stomach and of which, perhaps, no ultimate understanding.