The new ‘golden rule’: Mind your own damn business

A former assistant football coach at a Lutheran school, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) surely knows the Gospels. In Matthew 7:12, Jesus says, “So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

Christ was teaching the gathered crowds ancient wisdom, which had been part of Jewish and pagan teaching alike. “Do unto others ...” is a maxim preached across cultures, and it has been called the “golden rule” for 400 years. The coinage seems to have come from British Protestants.

In his own Sermon on the Mount, his debut speech as the Democratic nominee for vice president, Walz gave us a new teaching: “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn't make the same choice for ourselves, there's a golden rule, mind your own damn business.”

Walz quite obviously does not follow his golden rule. Not only did he mandate masks and try to mandate the COVID vaccine in 2021, but he also set up a snitch line and encouraged people to rat out their neighbors for having birthday parties. Wherever 16 or more were gathered in his state, Walz wanted the police to be there, breaking it up.

Walz opposed concealed carry legislation in Congress and wanted to ban the AR-15, the most commonly owned firearm in America. He said on national television that freedom of speech didn’t apply to whatever he deemed “misinformation.” Censoring your political opponents is hardly minding one’s own business.

To be fair to Walz, he wasn’t actually talking about any broad concept of privacy or individual liberty. “Mind your own damn business” simply meant “abortion should be legal in all circumstances.”

The political hypocrisy is the less interesting story here. More interesting is his curmudgeonly “leave me alone” ethos replacing Christian love and fellowship.

“Mind your own damn business” is different from “do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” It’s certainly different from Jesus’s Great Commandment to love God and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Some of it, surely, is the reserved sensibility of German Lutherans in northern latitudes. But it’s also something deeper.

A new ethos is taking over the minds of American and European elites. It’s an ethos that worships autonomy and distrusts connection. You can see hints of Rousseau in it. It leads toward what Christopher Lasch called “narcissism” and what Emile Durkheim called “anomie.”

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Relations are replaced with transactions. Unchosen obligations, such as family and neighbors, are disdained as infringements on our ability to author our own lives on a blank page, unburdened by what has been.

It’s hardly Christian to ignore your neighbors and family, but neighborly neglect is apparently what today’s political elites see as a universal value.