The Golden Rule and Optimism

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." Matthew 7:12
This is the passage often referred to as "the golden rule." In essence, it says: If you want people to treat you a certain way, them you treat them that way. Sounds like a simple idea, but it has immense implications. One implication that I've found in my life is that I am much more optimistic about the future.

Lately I've had the opportunity to consider optimism and whether it's a valid outlook on reality and history. I served 4.5 months, middle of October to middle of February, in Clearlake, California. This place used to be a tiny resort town, because the lake called Clearlake used to be a tourist and vacation attraction in the state of California. Well at some point Clearlake stopped being clear, and as a result, the industry supporting that town left. Nothing else has replaced that. A large portion of that town is unemployed, and has had a history of drug and alcohol use, and that's if they aren't using now. The kids that live there largely don't know any better type of life, and so they cause a lot of damage to themselves, family, and friends without realizing the full implications of their actions. The people that I talked to regularly seemed to have no hope, and no manners either.

That's sounds pretty depressing right? I was pretty bummed out when I was first working there. I was miserable, and the place felt like a prison.

One day, I realized that the people that live in that place are largely the "forgotten people", or the downtrodden, of society: drug addicts, those with mental disorders, the poor, and the immediate family of such people, especially the children. Society at large seems to have given up on these people, written them off as somehow less than human. These people have hard lives. Some of that hardness is the result of their own choices, and some of it is the result of where they live and their economic standing. Whatever the source of the hardness in their lives doesn't truly matter because these people are in need of hope and kindness, and Clearlake seemed to have a tragically short supply of both.


So, I decided to try something new: be the type of person that I hoped to find. I wanted to find polite, hopeful people trying their hardest to make a better situation for themselves and their family. So I needed to be that type of person, and show it. This took me a while, but I was able to have those things more in my thoughts than when I first arrived at Clearlake. Once that happened, I found people like that. And some people that I had written off in my mind as not worth the effort to talk to showed that they were indeed worth the effort of talking to. Of course, there were still those had no desire to change, and while I was sad for their sakes, I also realized that people are capable of using their agency in order to change at almost any point in their lives. I cannot, and neither can anyone else, force a positive and uplifting change to happen to another person. At some point, they have to make the choice themselves to change.

No one is capable of living a perfect sinless life. It is part of human nature to err in judgment and make mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are small, and sometimes they are huge. The only person that has ever lived a sinless life has been Jesus Christ.  As such, we need to keep in mind that when working with other people, that we too are imperfect. Christ taught in the New Testament that we need to refrain from making judgments of other people because we have our faults and those faults obstruct our view. (Matthew 7:1-5, Luke 6:41-42) To put this idea into bumper sticker language: "Don't judge me because I sin differently than you do." In fact, a member of the First Presidency of the church recently talked about this. (Click here for that talk in various formats.)


In closing, please remember that everyone has moral agency, the ability to discern and choose between good and evil. There are going to be somethings that are simply beyond our ability to control or influence. But, we always have control of our attitude and our outlook. When we dwell on how awful the world is, how unjust society can be, and how awful our lives are, we are missing the good things of the world. Yes, there is evil, and it is prevalent in modern society. But, by choosing to be optimistic, we are combating the evil, and that is something that requires a lot of effort and is worth the struggle. Being optimistic does not, by itself, make one blind to the existence of human sufferings and trial. What being optimistic does is allows you, as it did me, to face those problems and find how to address those issues far better than a pessimistic, self-defeating attitude. part of my testimony of the gospel revolves around faith. If we have faith, we are more likely to find/achieve what we are looking for. If we have faith that there isn't much, if any, good left in the world, then we are likely to find that. Likewise, if our faith is toward optimism, you will find good in people.