For a simple life-affirming rule, “Thou shalt not kill” is tough to beat. However, it offers very little guidance when confronted by an attacker with murderous intent. Further, because all life requires the consumption of energy found in other life forms (animal and vegetable), this commandment gives no advice at all. 

Pushed to extremes, rarely are logical rules alone prescriptive guides to ethical behavior. For example, the physician’s “Do no harm” is hardly helpful in the abortion of a woman’s unborn fetal cells. (Read the laws.) In this case, by not “doing,” the physician may cause irreparable harm, even death to the patient—who is the human, not the clump of cells. 

It’s no surprise that how we act requires ideas and human mediation, not just rules. Rules are static; the world and society are not. To find coherence, perhaps the best we can do is apply our morality and the current rule of law to this constantly evolving society, recasting and reshaping the legal design to retrofit all the factors and unique elements that have newly emerged. 

This effort is on a symphonic scale and we seek a creative “conductor” as well as vibrant institutions to take the transformative actions that will “make things right.” It is a broad plan, hardly ever a formula. What cannot be evaded is that personal values will guide the process. Values like the sanctity of human life, the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, the preservation of life on the planet, the adherence to a specific belief system, strict ideological or religious thought, the celebration of diversity, etc., all will direct the overall adjustments of the social order. 

In a democratic nation, laws, Congress, the courts and the executive branch play their part in any reform of what exists.

Lately, in Trump’s America, the driving values shaping new changes in society seem mostly based on his imagined personal revenge and maximizing cruelty and harm to friend and foe. He is not the leader we should want and he is not “making it right.” Even as an ideologue, his chaos hardly rates. Aided by an unelected government looter, Musk, juvenile boy fantasies of machismo seem to be what is fueling the palpable antidemocratic drift. 

Our oldest elected president is practicing on a level of adolescent pettiness that ignores the pain of others and focuses on his imagined personal suffering; the suffering of a billionaire. Let us all pass the hat for him—and then the boot. We need a fresh “conductor” with humane values; one who recommits to working people, not the super-rich. However long it takes, we can and will fix the current governmental shambles.

John Pace lives in Honesdale, PA. He writes on Substack at John Pace.