In this respect, Jungian analyst James Hillman goes as far as holding psychotherapy responsible for the tawdriness of American politics since the 1950s. In his reckoning, all the smart people are sitting in therapy incapacitated, their therapists having convinved them that the source of their misery is to be found within themselves. The net result is a state of near oblivion as regards the political debacles that have unfolded around them for the last half-a-century.

... 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.

There is a logic behind human conduct, although it does not reveal itself through conventional reasoning skills.

This brings me to the psychoanalytic perspective and its major advantage over other approaches, namely, its ready acceptance that humans are motivated, for the most part, by factors far beyond their conscious awareness.

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.

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.