... the final chapter delineates the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ as a dignified mode of human relating that is based on acts of deep empathy. It describes how this ancient philosophy - that we treat others as we wish to be treated and that we do not treat them as we do not wish to be treated - emerged all over the world as a result of the rampant structural violence unleashed by the rise of agrarian societies.

The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.

The so-called Golden Rule is as old as civilisation itself. In its positive form, it calls for right action, that is, treating others as one would hope to be treated oneself. In its negative form, it calls for right inaction, or, not doing to others what one would not have done for oneself. Both iterations call for imaginative acts of deep empathy and, for this, one could do worse than look to the great world teachers for instruction.

The appetite for psychological knowledge is growing all the time and, while there are complex sociological explanations for this, my imminent concern is to think through the connections that bind modern psychological thinking to the humanist legacy that is Golden Rule thinking.

Golden Rule thinking is exactly that: it, too, encourages us, through empathetic acts of imagination, to recognise in others the humanity in which we all unarguably share.