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I’m not enthusiastic about 10 Commandments or 11 Commandments either and The 147 Suggestions coming out of the Delphic Oracle about 500 BC are an easier list to apply to daily living and are plausibly the source document for the later ones.

The hubris of making Commandments is offensive to modern scientifically inclined people. We like to think for ourselves and easily become resistant to people telling us what to do, how to live our lives. This attitude is exacerbated by the near constant and ubiquitous flow of advertising. It is more subtle than Commanding us what to do, or even suggesting how we might behave; instead, they put models of behavior before us that attract us to spend our time and money in ways that appear to benefit us while clearly benefiting them.

It appears that “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was an adequate statement of aspirations for the Founding Fathers of the US. They didn’t lay a burden of Commandments on their constituents, and instead instituted limits on the powers of the government to what was necessary for public safety and order. Ben Franklin separately postulated the goals of happy, healthy, wise and wealthy but these are presented as aspirations to be sought for by normal people and not demands. You are not commanded to be happy, you are not compelled to be healthy, you are not dragged into wise motivations, and you don’t have money forced into your pockets. All of those are offered as rights that citizens are encouraged to pursue and may comfortably possess.

The idea being pursued is, how can we make it most likely that these things will come into our daily lives? Bringing things into being with commandments given by a punishing authority will generate opposite reactive behaviors, and even suggestions will stimulate their opposite effects to be brought into a mirrored reality of their mildly oppressive qualities. Even the world of advertising with their clever semi-hidden manipulations of our minds will generate resistance. A way to approach those desirable qualities is to:

Treat everyone better than you treat yourself.