When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U & ME. I rolled on the floor laughing when I heard this for the first time from my college professor. For a long time, I assumed it was his original. Recently, when I googled, I found several versions of its origin, dating as far back as 1957. Judging is a trait as old as humanity itself; it has now assumed alarming proportions.
What is Judgment, and why do we pass one?
What is judging? Why do we judge compulsively? Why is judging harmful? Lots of questions! Why don’t we begin with understanding what judging even means?
Judging refers to forming opinions based on incomplete data. Human intelligence is accustomed to analyzing & cataloging every piece of information. It is fair to say one is free of any kind of judgment only when he/she is just born. As we take baby steps of growth and start soaking in external stimuli, the process of categorization begins. Oh, these are my parents, and I see them every day hence they are familiar. So, I am comfortable in their company. Oh, they are strangers, so I get scared when they take me in their arms. This goes on as we encounter more people and undergo varied experiences. This process can also be called conditioning, and with the passing years, we start getting opinionated.
During my childhood, my classmates were generally known by her/his surname which was usually a religion/caste identifier. I grew up in circumstances where people made it a point to know which caste or religion you belonged to. Judgment would start then and there. Fortunately, now when I ask my children their class fellows’ names, most of the time they are first names. They don’t know their surnames, nor are they bothered about knowing those.
To know a human completely is a long-drawn process through a series of interactions. I reckon we don’t have the patience for that kind of thinking. So, we tend to choose the easy over what’s right. Try and categorize each individual so that I don’t have to go through the entire process again. If only it were that easy. Research says the chance of two people being genetically identical is the same as the chance of getting heads 6.4 million straight tosses of a fair coin. And here we are trying to put all individuals in 8 to 10 boxes we know of.
“All books are judged by their covers until they are read.”
~ Maryrose Wood, The Mysterious Howling
If we have to judge, let us judge positively, erring on the better side. It is a powerful hack to
get the best out of people. If we develop a habit of ignoring minor irritants and compulsively
finding good, over time, good will come in search of us..
Reel vs. Real is causing us to judge even more!
With the preponderance of social media, we live dichotomous lives – one real and the other virtual. It is like behavior on and off camera. We assume others to be living a dual life, too, and hence, we tend to judge even more.
There is another aspect of judgment that relates to actions and how we jump to conclusions. How often does it happen that you perceive an action as good or bad, and your views are turned on the head when there is an altogether different context to validate that action? Most of the time, we jump the gun and react sometimes, even before the action is completed, let alone understanding the context or listening to their versions. Forming opinions or reacting based just on the actions is judgment, while trying to understand the intention behind the action is maturity.
“When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself.”
~Earl Nightingale
Wising up to hold judgments
I love our pet beagle Freddie – such an innocent character, in fact, stupid by human standards. He greets me with the same joy when I return from the office every day in the evening or after a week of touring. My soulmate has a home-based food business, and we have three of her employees working from morning to evening. Freddie has a simple logic; whoever is home from morning to evening is family and must not leave home. He creates such a ruckus when it’s time for them to go home. By his reckoning everyone who is at home is family. I wish we humans could be that generous.
As we grow older and reminisce about our past, we come across situations that we look at far differently than we did then. Maturity, in hindsight, has no relevance. I wish I hadn’t done that, or I wish I had done that doesn’t alter anything, either the past or the present. At best, it can have an impact on the future, provided I learn the lessons and stop judging.
“Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?”
~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
How do we stop judging
What, then, is the solution? For a start stop categorizing if you can! Humans can simply be humans rather than belonging to some gender, region, religion, caste, age bracket, appearance, community, etc. We should train our brains to expect and accept diversity. What freedom do we give ourselves when we can relate to people without any bias?
Let’s stop reacting to actions in isolation; instead, try and understand the intention behind the action. As we learned before, we are conditioned, and all our actions result from the same. So, two individuals conditioned differently may act differently, although their intentions may be the same. Conversely, identical actions may be born out of different intentions. Our reaction should relate to the intention.
The need for differentiation or compartmentalization is born out of pure materialistic living. We are too consumed by ourselves and too individualistic these days. We have lost our ability to get into others’ shoes. More reasons why our judgments tend to be off the mark. One more thing is not to be influenced by what people project on social media. They may have a specific purpose to do so.
Adding a spiritual dimension to our current life should help the cause. One of the deeper aspects of spirituality is that one starts connecting with people at the energy level. There is no place for appearances and action or behavior-based judgments in the spiritual plane.
“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
https://kfoundation.org/krishnamurti/ ~J. Krishnamurti
Be a compulsive good finder, Be appreciative all the time
If we have to judge, let us judge positively, erring on the better side. It is a powerful hack to
get the best out of people. If we develop a habit of ignoring minor irritants and compulsively
finding good, over time, good will come in search of us. What a beautiful world it will be
when all of us see only the best version of ourselves and all others.
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