Do Unto Others
On the Moral Divide Between Democracies and Autocracies
“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” — Matthew 7:12
The old saying — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is a piece of moral advice that presumes that the other is not a stranger to our humanity but a reflection of it; that justice rests on imagination, the capacity to place oneself, however imperfectly, in another’s situation. Democracies, when they live up to their better selves, are built upon this imagination of reciprocity. They take it for granted that trust is possible, that agreement and law can stand in for fear, that the governed are not enemies to be subdued but partners in a shared moral enterprise.
Autocracies, by contrast, begin elsewhere. They look upon the same human field and see not the possibility of cooperation but the certainty of danger. Where democracies build with trust, autocrats build with suspicion. They see the world not as a community of equals but as a hierarchy of threats, a place where restraint is read as weakness, and only control promises stability. In that universe, morality becomes an affair of vigilance rather than empathy: strike first, before you are struck.
The democratic imagination rests upon the conviction that each person — and by extension each nation — carries an irreducible moral weight. To treat another as an equal is not a concession but an acknowledgment of shared dignity. Within nations, this belief takes the shape of law, consent, and accountability; between nations, it becomes diplomacy, treaty, and the slow labour of building predictable norms.
Immanuel Kant gave philosophical form to this instinct for fairness when he wrote:
“Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”¹
Here, the old Golden Rule is refined into a rule of reason: act only on principles that could be willed for everyone. It is a demand for moral coherence. A reminder that justice is not about preference but about universality. In political life, that same coherence takes institutional form. Republican or democratic states, Kant argued, are less tempted to war because their citizens must bear its cost; those who bleed and pay for the consequences of policy have a way of insisting on restraint.
Out of this has grown the modern network of alliances and laws, the conviction that stability rests on agreement. Not domination. Predictability, though less dramatic than heroism, becomes its own form of peace.
The autocrat, however, inhabits a moral world in which the surface calm of order always trembles above the abyss. However secure the throne or the state, the possibility of betrayal never disappears. Trust becomes a luxury; control, a duty. The German jurist Carl Schmitt, writing on the turmoil of the twentieth century, defined politics as the distinction between friend and enemy, and sovereignty as “he who decides on the exception.”² To rule is to reserve the right to act outside the rules when necessity demands.
From such reasoning flows the ethic of pre-emption: better to control than be controlled, better to strike before the blow can fall. Repression becomes prudence; expansion becomes self-defence. In this moral grammar, mercy courts collapse and compromise is a form of surrender. The autocrat’s code is not without morality, but it is morality written under the sign of fear; the conviction that peace is preserved only through dominance.
Democracies, meanwhile, are prone to a recurring illusion that their own moral grammar is universal. They imagine that goodwill will be mirrored, that generosity will elicit gratitude. It appears there is a refusal to accept that some values simply do not converge.
This is the wishful-thinking trap of liberal optimism. To those who live by reciprocity, the act of restraint feels inherently persuasive, as if moderation should be recognised as virtue. But the autocrat reads it differently. Where the democrat sees civility, the autocrat sees weakness. Each offer of dialogue appears as an opportunity; each hesitation, a window for advantage. George Kennan, writing in another tense age, observed that Russian rulers had long interpreted Western restraint not as moral strength but as strategic indecision.
The misunderstanding, then, is not simply about power but about moral translation. Democracies speak the language of empathy; autocracies, the language of fear. Each is internally coherent yet mutually opaque.
We inhabit a world in which these two moral grammars coexist uneasily. One rests on the belief that justice depends on shared recognition; the other, that survival depends on vigilance. Each claims a kind of righteousness. Yet between them lies a chasm of imagination: the difference between seeing the neighbour as potential ally and seeing him as potential enemy.
The task for democracies is not to abandon their ethic of reciprocity but to practise it with eyes open: to act with generosity without assuming it will be returned; to hold fast to law and empathy even when others dismiss them as weakness. For the enduring temptation is to become the mirror of what one fears.
If the democratic creed is still Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the autocrat’s creed — spoken more quietly, but no less sincerely — is its inversion: Do unto others before they do it to you.
¹ Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31.
² Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.