Desiderata

I've been reflecting on the intrinsic hopelessness of influencing the world. The only people who can change the world are the ones with immense wealth and power, and even those people are constrained by the strings attached to the acquisition or inheritance of power (assuming it's not renounced) -- and those strings include the willingness to accept marching orders from any predator higher up in the food chain, or equivalently, to relinquish the moral autonomy that is the foundation of what I believe most people mean when they speak of having a soul. (Or maybe it's just what I mean. I incline to the Quaker view that what is within us of God, and to me the strongest evidence of the existence of God, is our moral compass, and it is this, when no other directive from the Deity appears to be "incoming," to which I think we are bidden at all times to pay heed. I do think, by way of a sidebar within the parenthetical, that God sometimes speaks to us more directly, and I will admit that this is because it happened to me once, in a way that was unambiguous and could be attributed to no other cause.) Anyway, the upshot of these beliefs, and the set of commandments supplementary and perhaps superordinate to the ones most of us who belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition (and many other people of good faith) embrace, are the following. Maybe, if I were Jefferson, I would characterize them as moral "truths [to be held] self-evident." I consider them moral imperatives, and will on no account violate them, not at cost of my life.

So, as it turns out "desiderata" was probably the wrong title for this post. "Commandments" is already taken, and has a specific referent within the Judeo-Christian traditions. "What must remain inviolate" is a bit convoluted and also prolix. So I'm going to call these:

IMPERATIVES

1) Make no Faustian bargains. Never trade your soul (or your moral autonomy, or your faith, or any element, howsoever small, of your covenant with God) for power, for wealth, for belonging or protection or "connectedness" or even your life.
2) DO NO HARM to other humans. (the Hippocratic provision, which I think should apply to a broader spectrum of humanity, specifically to all of it, than just to physicians) I know also that none of us is omniscient, and none of us can foresee all the outcomes (such as those alluded to in chaos theory whereby the flapping of butterfly wings precipitates a tsunami 12,000 miles away) of any one our acts. Or the case I'll borrow from Douglas Adams, in which the incidental utterance of a completely innocuous phrase by an unknowing speaker travels through a randomly-generated mini-wormhole and thereby causes a thousand-year war on the other side of the galaxy. If we cannot plausibly foresee, if no reasonable person could be expected to foresee, that eating a salad on a given day would cause someone else to be hurt 30 years later (or 30 seconds later), then there's no moral foul. Maybe there would be for an omniscient being, but there's only one of those, and He wouldn't commit a moral transgression. Anyway, this clause naturally and necessarily exempts all such cases, but focuses on acts that have injurious outcomes to other humans of high probability that can reasonably be anticipated by the doer. Those are the ones herewith prohibited.
3) Never seek power.
4) Never take orders, or join a group that requires you to relinquish your moral autonomy. In general, never join any group other than the one to which you already belong -- the human race. Never seek to subdivide it. No other person is worth less than you are in the eyes of God, either intrinsically, or by dint of belonging to or having a different appearance, intelligence, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, genetic provenience, socioeconomic status... or religion (unless it's satanism, which would actively and compulsively reject all of these moral desiderata, in any case).
5) Never take up a weapon, no matter what pretext you're given. You may be assured that someone else will point it for you, to the detriment of another human, and that the outcome will violate not only God's will, but, with overwhelming probability, your own moral values. (This is not meant as a reference to rank-and-file members of the armed forces, who are mostly people of good intentions who sincerely believe that they are acting to protect their families and their country. I think they have been atrociously abused by the system (by all the systems), but I do not doubt that most of them act out of a) genuine personal conviction and/or b) perceived economic necessity. Obviously, I think everyone, soldiers included, should obey their moral compasses, but nor do I regret the liberation of Dachau, which obviously involved weapons. It's an evil world, and an impossible moral Gordian Knot. I do, however, universally condemn the taking up of arms in secret, for unofficial, undeclared and hidden and/or private agendas. I do NOT mean to heap opprobrium on anyone already trapped in a hell not of his or her own making.)
6) Love God by doing what you can to help others.

I think that pretty much captures my moral values. Perhaps #6 should be #1, but I think any violation of one of the first five deprives one of the ability (and also, usually, the willingness) aggressively to pursue the very last.