Breaking Down Barriers: The Pitfalls Of Judging Others

It is impossible to judge people objectively - your basis for forming an opinion is a function of the unique circumstances of your life (location, time, genetics, environment, etc.), thus your conclusions are dependent on factors external to you. No one is privy to your inner world and you are not privy to theirs. How then can we ever know what they should or shouldn’t do?

In this talk I break down the pitfalls of judging others and discuss the implications for a life well lived.

Transcript

They say you shouldn't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes,

But I would suggest that it's impossible.

It's impossible to be able to fully judge anyone else's situation,

Their actions.

Now,

Yes,

It becomes immediately obvious that there are certain things that people have done and will do that are,

You know,

Quote-unquote wrong,

But for the vast majority of humanity and our decisions and the things we do,

I would argue that we're in no place to really suggest anything,

To judge in any way,

Because the very thing that's doing the judging is itself a function of environment,

A function of genetics.

The way that I see the world right now is through my own eyes,

As a function of my own experiences,

Both in the country I'm born in,

The time that I'm born in,

And the demographics of which I belong.

My upbringing,

My education,

All of the things that have happened to me,

That I've read or watched or consumed or done,

That forms the basis of my understanding of the world.

No one has lived that life,

No other person other than me.

So even if I assume I have full grasp of my inner and outer worlds,

Which of course I don't,

I'm still uniquely poised to view the world through my own opinion,

Through my own perspective,

Just as everyone else is.

I know that if I was raised differently,

If I had different experiences,

I would view the world differently.

Psychology,

Deep meditation backs this up.

The impact of one's environment and the things they experience,

Particularly quite early on,

Tends to judge and impact and corrupt,

You know,

Depends on what words you want to say,

How that person has and will experience their life.

If someone looks at you ambiguously and you're not quite sure what they're feeling,

What they're thinking,

One person will assume one thing,

Whereas someone else will assume another thing.

You can look at any of these experiments online,

Experiments about ambiguity,

About questioning,

About unique situations that pose questions that have no true answer.

And people will give different responses,

And they give different responses because they're different people.

This sounds obvious,

But there's some deep,

There's some deep implications to this.

You know,

It's easy to look at what people should or shouldn't do,

But you're looking at it from your own perspective,

Through your own lens,

Whereas those people are looking at life through their lens.

I guess it's a aspect of moral relativism.

What's right for me and wrong for me seems like it should be globally applied,

But were I raised differently,

I would then be thinking differently.

The thing doing the judging is itself a function of the society and times that it's been raised in.

I myself have read and consumed a lot of books on religion and spirituality and philosophy and psychology,

All of these different things.

But if I was raised in a different time,

In a different place,

I wouldn't have access to those resources.

Thus my ability to even comprehend this question,

This line of reasoning,

This idea of judging someone else,

That we shouldn't judge them unless we've walked a mile in their shoes.

Even that concept itself is a function of my upbringing.

If I was never exposed to this idea of not judging people until you've walked a mile in their shoes,

Right,

Would I even be contemplating this right now?

Would the concept of judgment and maybe not judging other people be something that I would be considering?

If you look back at the past,

And you know,

Even at the present,

Depends on where you are,

There's a lot of zealotry and bigotry and idealism and,

You know,

I'm right,

Righteous thought,

Very self-centered thought,

You know,

That would take place from the individual all the way up to,

You know,

Countries or religions.

Those people over there,

They're savages because they don't believe in the god we believe,

But they're looking at us like we're savages because we don't believe in their gods,

Because our practices and routines and rituals and societal things that we're implementing are foreign to them.

How can both be savages?

How could either be savages,

Right?

Whose religion is more true?

If there's two religions that directly contradict each other,

Which one is right?

Well,

The one you belong to,

Of course.

That's the correct one.

That's the right one,

And anyone that doesn't follow the moral tenets of that religion can be deemed immoral,

Can be deemed wrong,

Can be deemed,

Can be judged,

Right?

They need to be saved.

You see what I'm going for here?

But of course,

You know,

Even you,

Even I,

Whoever it is that follows those tenets,

Follows that religion,

Will never quite make it up to be the true follower of that religion.

A lot of people will have a deity that presents a moral guide,

And that moral guide will say,

You know,

Act and do in a certain way.

But of course,

How we interpret those moral teachings,

Those religious teachings,

Are dependent on our upbringings.

If you come from a certain place,

You will look at the same text as other people in a different place and interpret it differently.

Maybe you'll look and you'll consider your own aspect,

Your own morality,

Or your own subjective interpretation of your own morality and actions,

And go,

Well,

I'm not right,

But I'm close.

I'm striving to be a little bit better.

People that are far more conservative than you,

You'll judge them for being too conservative.

People that are far more liberal than you,

You'll judge them for being liberal.

But once again,

Those liberal people are judging you as being far too conservative,

And those people you view as conservative are viewing you as far too liberal.

It's all a spectrum.

It's all a sliding scale.

How can I judge anyone when I haven't lived their life and I never can?

I've faced challenges and difficulties in my life.

But just a quick perusal of the news and you see that people are struggling in circumstances that I literally couldn't imagine.

And then I look at my life and worry about my struggles and go,

What I'm dealing with is nothing.

And yet it feels like everything,

Because to me it is everything.

And yeah,

I couldn't survive in those circumstances that those people are surviving in.

Let alone thriving in,

Right?

Why couldn't I?

Because I didn't live their life.

If you took me out of my town,

Out of my country,

Out of my time,

Changed any of those variables,

Changed any of my physical characteristics,

I would be clueless.

I don't know what it's like to live the life of another person,

Another gender,

Another sexuality,

Another religion,

Another anything.

How could I?

How could I possibly know?

You know,

If I walk outside and get a certain reaction from the people in my town based on my physical appearance,

Based on my gender,

Based on my age,

That's how I think the world is.

Because that is what the world is to me.

You know,

If someone,

They've done studies,

People that are,

You know,

Quote unquote,

More attractive,

Tend to acquire better jobs.

They are tended to be viewed as morally better.

People judge them as friendlier.

This is a bias that people have.

We have this bias towards lookisms.

Same as age.

Sometimes age is seen as a,

In certain cultures,

Seen as a a sign of wisdom.

In other cultures,

It's seen as,

You know,

Like,

Oh,

Those old people over there need to be sort of pushed aside into the old person's homes sort of situation,

Right?

What I'm trying to say is,

And what I'm trying to suggest is,

Is that every situation is unique,

And it's all dependent on our own upbringings and our own experiences.

How easy is it to hear a story told by someone else about a third party and instantly,

In the very instant you hear it,

Make judgments?

I would do this.

They should have done that.

You have no idea.

I have no idea.

When I introspect on the problems that I'm having in my life,

And my inner responses to those problems,

I realize that even when I'm judging myself,

It's a,

I shouldn't judge myself because,

You know,

I've,

I've walked a mile in my own shoes,

Right?

But I haven't walked this mile.

I haven't faced these challenges.

I'm not this person.

You know,

We're changing constantly,

Day in,

Day out.

We are a different person.

Who I am today is different to who I was and different to who I will be.

And beyond that,

I see that my inner responses are often irrational.

They're not based on a logical choice.

I feel like I personally will act or react emotionally and then sort of retrospectively add a logical understanding of my decision.

And it's easy to think that you make logical decisions that other people base their actions and decisions logically.

But if you look at your own thought processes,

You know,

Maybe this is me just applying my own judgments across other people,

Right?

But I know that when I look at my own thought processes,

I see that a lot of my decision making is made based on a rationality,

Based on an impulse,

Based on emotion,

Not based on cult logic.

But then when I look at the problems of other people,

This voice of judgment goes like,

Oh,

They should have just done this.

It's obvious,

You know,

To the person suffering from anxiety,

Just get this treatment,

Just do this action,

Just go outside,

Just exercise,

Just it's very easy to judge a logical response to a problem,

But you're not in that space.

I think there's an issue of believing that your own inner world is far more deep and complex than everyone else's.

And it makes sense why we view this way.

You know,

I am privy to my own inner world.

I see it all.

I see more than what other people see,

Right?

If I look at you,

I just see what I see on your face.

I just hear your words.

I see your body language and can observe your actions over time,

But I'm not privy to the thoughts behind it.

If you see me sharing a poem,

For example,

All you get is the poem,

Is the words on the page,

But you don't get any of the thought that goes into that poem,

Right?

If I express to you my deepest emotionality about a certain topic via words on a page,

You don't hear the thoughts that don't hear the thoughts that go into that.

You don't understand the word choices.

I,

You know,

You're not privy to any of that.

All you're left with is the physical product of my work,

The art,

My labor,

Right?

But then you might judge me based on what that poem has said.

Fair enough.

You're entitled to do that judging,

But it won't be a fair comparison because you're not able to see the words and the thoughts and the implications that go into that creation.

I,

I'm thinking of all of this and I'm wondering,

I'm like,

How much wasted time and mental effort and energy have I spent judging people?

And what's that?

What's more,

I suppose,

Is that I've recognized that I've judged people and then I've had expectations based on those judgments.

And then when those expectations inevitably get let down,

I feel sad.

I feel betrayed.

I feel a lack of trust or whatever.

But the thing is,

Is those expectations are born of judgments and those judgments are born of false information or a lack of full information.

If I believe that someone should do X,

Y,

Z for me,

Or should just do something in general,

I'm not in their minds.

I'm not in their,

Their emotionality.

All I can see is what I would do in that situation,

Right?

So I'm judging them based on,

Well,

Just judging them.

And it's not fair.

It's not fair to them to,

You know,

Just live in my own world and be upset at them for doing or acting in a certain way that is an external perspective.

But obviously this leads us to,

I guess,

A different problem here is that the only way we can really get through life is by judging.

If,

If I've got a lived experience of certain things and certain actions or places or people or events or,

You know,

Something happening causes good things to happen in my life,

Bad things to happen,

If it's safe or if it's dangerous,

Surely there's a benefit of applying those judgments to learn.

I mean,

That's what we do.

We are pattern finding creatures.

You know,

The classic example is if you hear a rustling in the bushes,

You're going to judge that rustling as a tiger and go the other way because to not judge it as dangerous would be to put yourself in danger potentially.

And you might be right 99% of the time,

But that 1% of the time you are dead.

So we are taught to learn,

To judge,

To very quickly make our minds up to keep ourselves safe because our minds are consuming a lot of energy and to preserve ourselves over time we need to make snap judgments to survive,

Make sense.

So how can we find that balance?

This is,

This is a tough one and I think that the,

The best way is to introspect,

To practice meditation,

Mindfulness,

Introspection,

All of these things and just trying to see the thought process that occur in my mind.

What I'm suggesting here is just my ruminations on this topic.

I realized that I myself act irrationally.

I make decisions based on an emotion that pops up,

Not based on reality per se.

And someone might be judging me based on my emotional responses.

Why?

Because they can see the objective truth of my world,

But they're not inside my subjective mind and thus they don't understand why I'm having a panic attack,

Right?

Everything's fine,

Well it is fine,

But you're not feeling down those thought processes.

So that thought,

That realization that I can't be judged or it would be hard to judge my life has made me realize that in the exact same way I need to stop judging everyone else's life because I simply don't know.

And yes,

I can learn,

I can pattern recognize,

But maybe it's that idea of strong opinions loosely held.

Yeah,

I'm ideally wanting to be able to be proved wrong.

Now,

If there's situations that have caused danger and duress and let down and breakdown and issues and conflicts in the past,

Then I should be informed by those because obviously,

You know,

We live in,

In a reality that is causational.

If you touch a hot stove,

You're going to judge that hot stoves are dangerous.

That makes sense.

However,

You would be wise to be open to your perceptions changing.

The,

The threading of the needle on that one is quite challenging,

Obviously.

And I guess,

I guess for me,

My practice will be to recognize when I'm judging people offhand,

To recognize when I'm judging situations offhand,

To try and step back and detach and just realize that my judgments are just a function of my upbringing.

It's not truth.

It's a possible truth.

And I have to act on what I know,

But it's not the truth.

And why someone chose to act or do or be might have completely different causes than what I'm viewing and what I'm believing and what I'm seeing myself.

And the judgment is a tool,

But it's not the be all and end all tool.

So let me know what you think.

Anyway,

Thank you.