Principles, standards or boundaries?
Principles, standards or boundaries? Principles are eternal truisms like kindness or that life has value. In any culture or century it’s always true. Standards are living by principles. For example a flag represents a certain standard like America and freedom.
Rules or regulations are set up to allow or accent the standard. Those rules are boundaries or living by the rules. Most would agree there are rules that create the circumstance for the standard to be. Boundaries are created by rules. Boundaries keep you in a certain area or perimeter to either control or protect you or both.
This is done rightly and wrongly. This is done to self and to groups. This is society in a nutshell. Rules are mostly use when people don’t know any better or have a lack of education or just to support the standard. It is used for all but noticeable for children, handicapped or profoundly uneducated. In fact there are innumerable ways this can be true.
Boundaries are put in place to keep kids safe, soldier’s alive, couples progressing in marriage, friends from hurting themselves or one another. Boundaries are used not just to keep safe (rightly and wrongly) but also to help the weak and to control or take advantage, to subject or show power or authority.
Sometimes the boundary is self-inflicted, self-guided, or self-regulated. Sometimes it happens outside self on others. A fence around a farm is a boundary, a safe is a boundary, and office regulations are boundaries. These are not standards but meant to uphold the standard wanted in the circumstance.
Standards allow you to go out in the world instead of staying in the fenced area. And then help to not be thrown about dangers or just by every wind of opinion. An animal is fenced to protect and keep self or others safe. A person, once standards are learned, begins to venture further out into the world.
Standards allow you to discover how different doctrines or ideas or philosophies apply to your experiences and beliefs. The world has all kinds of standards to experience. The principles behind each are more universal though. As new principles are learned, they can be integrated with your known principles and applied to your standards.
This is how knowledge, wisdom, strength, and understanding are increased, reinforced and enlarged. Principles are always true or near always and they allow your personal freedom, when self-mastery and strength becomes inherent and also within the principles.
This freedom is diminished when mastery isn’t present, when a standard isn’t based in principle or even when a principle isn’t understood. A principle could be; all life has value, family is important, truth is moral. Each of these is pretty much always true.
Principles are by definition universal or near universal. They are everywhere and work no matter the time, culture, belief system or application. Principles can be applied through multiple rules or seem to fly in the face of the rules, depending on the correctness of the rules and how they are being used.
Principles however, are the guiding force of moral anything, goodness in general, why rules/policies are made, so that we can enforce, exemplify, and codify the principle. Principles are the standards we live by, want to live by, strive to live by, and hope to live up to.
Rules are how to apply the principle into a standard and sometimes how it’s done it isn’t a good fit. It only works well, justly and fairly when done properly. And that is the protection needed for human beings instead of only a boundary that limits experience.
The more rules are needed when less true principles are known or followed. Rules are set up before the principle knowledge is attained. In science, people try to find the principles or to channel the effects in an attempt to find the truth.
In religion there are the commandments that channel behavior so that there is time in safe living while the principles are being discovered. In fact, the rules both in science and religion can help or hinder the discovery of the principles depending on if they are good rules and correctly applied rules.
Rules can be good and are either put there to help and aid and protect or to shame and control and render powerless/powerful. Rules and policy in science and religion are situational and do not, cannot apply universally.
That doesn’t mean they don’t apply in sometimes a more general way; but they cannot apply in all situations because they are made, created for something specific, with a specific job and task and end point intended. The rules are mean to help find the principle.
A rule is a law, like in court, the judge’s ruling… not the judge’s principles. The judge’s principles and hopefully the standards the judge lives by however, affect and guide the ruling and hopefully for the best, at least that’s what is intended and mostly works.
The judges apply the laws (rules that seem to apply to this circumstance) to societal behaviors and happenings. If they correctly apply the law, and if the law is correct in the circumstance then the principles behind the law are proven and goodness or rightness is created.
If the principle is ignored or misunderstood/applied, then the ruling, or law applied is not going to fulfill what it was intended to create and give to society. This is when the standard is weakened. We have seen both of these in our lives.
An example is there is always light and darkness physically and metaphorically; or good and bad, or okay and not okay in the world and in life. This is our description of the principle that just exists because life exists. It is a foundation of understanding reality.
Now, what is light and dark or good and bad (ok and not ok) is mostly true… the sun is light, lack of the sun is darkness-mostly. Here is where we are going from principle to standard and the standard is near always like the sun. It is near always the personification of, the symbol of light and life and good.
There is a truth in the fact that the sun can go away or become what hurts or takes away life and light. Part of the difference between principle and standard is whether it is in the physical world. Eventually the ‘standards’ in the physical world though they may last for eons and thus be near principle like, yet they are still shorter and less powerful and long lasting as the principle behind the what the sun is-lightness and life.
So principles that are always true, are true beyond the physical world. And it is conceivable that there is lightness beyond the age of the sun, though it is considered light in the dark to us right now. So the principle is there is light and darkness.
The sun is the standard of the light and darkness principle. Day or night is the boundary of light and dark. Sunscreen or an umbrella are the rules or policies that allow the light or darkness to be properly used/applied/handled.
Good or common sense or moral living is light and done in the light usually. Negative, hurtful, usery living is darkness and done in darkness usually. Darkness can be behavioral here meaning hiding, not open and not freely shared or known. See though, now we are getting into standards that universally apply.
The rules and policies used to enforce a standard is where we can debate till the cows come home. If you are having trouble knowing what to do in a certain circumstance, perhaps you are trying to apply a rule/policy that doesn’t mesh well or correctly with the situation.
Perhaps there is a misapplied or incorrect boundary or the principal behind it doesn’t matter in this circumstance and it really ought to. Something is askew, what is askew is as wide a question as the Grand Canyon because we are now talking about the rules and hence boundaries. How rules make boundaries that codify the standards and show the principles in general is its own principle.
