First Principles

Ancient wisdom for today

A Note Before We Begin

Before diving into the concept of first principle thinking, I want to offer a brief disclaimer. Throughout this article, I’ll draw on the teachings attributed to Jesus. I want to be clear: this is not a religious argument. It doesn’t matter whether you believe Jesus was the Son of God, a great moral philosopher, or even a figure whose story was constructed over centuries. None of that changes the power of what was said.

The most durable first principles don’t belong to any religion or philosophy. They get borrowed by all of them, because they keep proving true. Jesus didn’t invent the Golden Rule. He just said it in a way that two billion people remembered.

So read what follows with whatever belief system you carry. The ideas stand on their own.

A Morning in Salas

This past morning, I found myself in a restaurant in Salas, a small town in northern Spain. I don’t speak Spanish. And in that restaurant, I was lost. I needed to get to Tineo, and I couldn’t communicate what I needed to the people around me.

That’s when I met Dave.

Dave was the only person in the restaurant who spoke any English. It was broken, halting English, but it was English, and he could see I was struggling. Without much fanfare, he pulled out his phone and looked up the bus schedule. He told me what time the bus would come. He told me where to go. And then, and this is the part I keep thinking about, he offered to take me there himself.

At 9:30, we walked out to his car. He drove me down the road to the bus stop, showed me exactly where to stand, and then said, “I’ll wait with you.”

And he did. For twenty minutes, Dave stood at that bus stop with me. We talked. He was warm, respectful, and genuinely kind. A stranger helping a stranger, simply because he could.

Dave didn’t deliberate. He didn’t weigh the inconvenience. He showed no annoyance at being interrupted from his work. I found out later that he was an architect living in Segovia in town to buy old houses to renovate. He was doing some serious work on his computer.

He saw a person who needed help, recognized something in that person’s situation that he understood, and he acted. That’s the Golden Rule in action. That’s first principle thinking with its sleeves rolled up.

The Question I Couldn’t Shake

As I stood there waiting for that bus, one thought kept surfacing: If Dave, a foreigner who spoke no English, walked into a restaurant somewhere in my country, confused and in need of help, would someone stop what they were doing, look up a bus schedule, drive him to the stop, and stand with him for twenty minutes?

I’d like to think yes. But honestly? I doubt it. Not today. Not in the current climate. And that’s worth sitting with, something genuinely sad about the direction we seem to be heading.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us stopped reasoning from first principles and started reasoning from fear. From tribalism. From the assumptions fed to us by politicians and algorithms designed to make us afraid of the person who looks or sounds different. We added so many layers of ideology on top of the bedrock truth, that is a human being who needs help, that we can no longer find the foundation.

What Is First Principle Thinking?

First principle thinking is the practice of stripping a problem down to its most basic, foundational truths, and then reasoning upward from there. Rather than relying on assumption, convention, or “the way things have always been done,” you ask: What do I know to be absolutely true? And what can I build from that?

It’s a concept with roots in ancient philosophy, Aristotle called first principles “the first basis from which a thing is known,” but it has found new life in modern problem-solving, from engineering breakthroughs to business strategy. But the most powerful applications of first principle thinking aren’t found in factories or boardrooms. They’re found in how we treat each other.

And for that, few sources are richer than the teachings of Jesus.

The Teachings as First Principles

You don’t need faith to recognize that certain ideas are foundationally, self-evidently true. That’s the test of a genuine first principle. It stands up when you examine it directly, independent of who said it or why.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The Golden Rule. Perhaps the purest ethical first principle ever articulated. It asks you to strip away identity, nationality, status, and difference, and reason from one bedrock truth: you know what it feels like to be human. So does the person in front of you. Start there.

It’s worth noting that Jesus wasn’t the first to say it. Confucius articulated it five centuries earlier. The Stoics lived by it. Kant built his entire moral philosophy around a version of it. The fact that it keeps reappearing across cultures and centuries isn’t a coincidence, it’s evidence that it points at something fundamentally true about human life.

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

A first principle so simple it sounds almost naive, until you actually try to live it. Who counts as your neighbor? In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus answers that question with uncomfortable directness: the neighbor is the stranger, the foreigner, the person your culture has told you to distrust. Love them the way you’d want to be loved. That’s the principle. Everything else is a footnote.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?”

This is a direct challenge to one of the greatest enemies of first principle thinking: our own bias. Before you can reason clearly from foundational truth, you have to be honest about the assumptions and prejudices you’re bringing to the table. This teaching doesn’t let you off the hook. It asks you to do the harder work first.

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Want to know your actual first principles, not the ones you claim, but the ones you live by? Look at where you spend your time, your money, and your energy. Your behavior reveals your true foundation, regardless of what you profess to believe. This is as useful a diagnostic for a corporation or a government as it is for an individual.

“Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Stripped of its theological context, this is a powerful statement about the gap between stated values and lived ones. First principle thinking is worthless if it stays in your head. At some point, the principle has to become action.

An Affront to First Principles: Today’s Political Climate

The most striking thing about today’s political climate in the United States is not simply that people disagree, disagreement is healthy and democratic. The striking thing is how much of the dominant political rhetoric actively inverts the teachings of Jesus, often while invoking his name.

The Stranger at the Border

Perhaps no issue makes the contradiction more visible than immigration. The current political climate has normalized language about immigrants that is explicitly dehumanizing. Describing human beings as “vermin,” an “invasion,” or as people who are “poisoning the blood” of the country is not a political position one can hold in good faith while claiming the Golden Rule as a guiding principle. Jesus was unambiguous: your neighbor is the stranger. The foreigner. The person your culture fears.

The Priest and the Levite Are Still Walking Past

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the people who walked past the injured man on the road weren’t villains. They were respectable, religious, busy people with places to be. The political logic of “they should have come here legally” or “we can’t afford to help everyone” is precisely the logic of those who walked past. It is the logic of the priest and the Levite, not the Samaritan.

Blessed Are the Poor

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most politically radical documents in human history, and it is unambiguously on the side of the poor, the hungry, the meek, and the marginalized. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Policies that cut food assistance, healthcare, and housing support for the most vulnerable while reducing taxes on the wealthiest represent a direct inversion of this teaching, regardless of which party proposes them.

What You Do to the Least of These

Jesus explicitly identified himself with the hungry, the sick, the stranger, the imprisoned: “I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me.” When policy is designed to restrict asylum, cut Medicaid, reduce school lunch programs, or criminalize homelessness, one doesn’t need to be a theologian to see the conflict.

The Deepest Contradiction

The deepest contradiction isn’t policy-based. It’s structural. Jesus taught from a posture of radical vulnerability and service: “The greatest among you shall be your servant.” The pursuit of dominance, power, wealth, and national superiority as the organizing principles of a political movement, even one that wraps itself in Christian imagery, is fundamentally at odds with what Jesus actually said and did.

A first principle thinker would ask: If I strip away the flags, the slogans, the party loyalty, and the television commentary, what is this actually built on? What are the foundational values here? In many cases, the honest answer is fear. And fear, as a first principle, produces the opposite of what Jesus taught.

Can a Non-Believer Adopt These as First Principles?

Absolutely, and the philosophical case for it is straightforward.

First principles, by definition, don’t derive their truth from authority. You don’t accept that 2 + 2 = 4 because a mathematician you trust said so. You accept it because it’s self-evidently true when you examine it directly. The same test applies here.

Take the Golden Rule. Ask yourself, honestly and independently: Is it true that I know what it feels like to be human? Is it true that the stranger across from me knows the same thing? Does it therefore follow that I should treat them accordingly?

If your answer is yes, and for most people, it is, then you have just adopted a first principle. Not on faith. On reason.

A non-believer can do exactly what a scientist does with a hypothesis: test it against reality. Dave ran that experiment on a Tuesday morning in Salas. The result was a small but genuine moment of human connection that a traveler is still thinking about hours later. The principle proved true in the field.

That’s all a first principle needs to do.

Reasoning Upward From Truth

First principle thinking, at its core, is an act of intellectual courage. It requires you to set aside what you’ve been told, what your side believes, what the algorithm served you this morning, and ask instead: What do I actually know to be true?

The bedrock truth, the one that every great ethical tradition keeps returning to, in every language and every century is this: the person in front of you is a human being. They want dignity. They want safety. They want connection. So do you.

Everything else is a layer of assumption built on top of that.

Dave understood this. He didn’t need a theology degree or a philosophy course. He just looked at a confused stranger in a restaurant and found the foundation. Then he acted from it.

The question this article is really asking, the question worth holding, is a simple one:

What first principles guide your decisions and actions?