Why
do people judge other people?
David Hunter, June 1, 2016
David
Hunter, Student of Life
4.1k Views
Fear mostly.
Judging and categorizing the people around you is the most efficient
way to reinforce the assumptions on which you base your core view of
reality. We use other people as mirrors on which to base our
essential view of the world and ourselves. That view is the sum of
everything that we have thought and experienced. It's also limited
by the experiences, thoughts and emotions that we refuse or deny.
One of the central sources of egoic stability and continuity is to
have one's judgments perpetually reinforced. Once we've made deeply
emotionally reinforced decisions about who we are and what the world
is, we cling to these views as a way of keeping our world (and
ourselves) constant. We are creatures of habit and we prefer the
devil we know. So if we believe the world is a lonely scary place
full of danger, we will react to it and to people in such a way that
these judgments are reinforced. If we believe that the world is
endlessly fascinating and varied and that we are lucky to be alive,
we also behave accordingly. Both views are based on judgments of
other people that elicit certain types of responses.
Most people, however, don't have the luxury of intensely
scrutinizing why they have developed the conclusions and judgments
they have. For them, their reality, good or bad, is the only one
they know and they plough ahead accordingly, sorting everyone they
come across into the categories that best fit their personal sorting
machines. When you tell people that the nature of the world is fully
bound up with their perception of it, they tend to feel threatened
and throw up any number of defenses, from shrugging dismissal to
ridicule to outright hostility and violence. They insist there is
'one real reality' which can be seen objectively and that to suggest
otherwise is 'crazy.' Or they conclude your idea is admissible only
to to the extent to which they are comfortable. Or they accept the
idea in such a way that they can continue to make judgments and
projections. Spiritual teachers and psychotherapists deal with this
resistance all the time.
This is because taking full responsibility for your view of reality
as it stands is beyond the intestinal fortitude of many people. It
means examining your own perception of reality along with your
resistance to certain aspects of it. It means willfully wrenching it
off the secure moorings of your cherished beliefs. It is the
equivalent of driving your car off a cliff. In a sense, it is crazy.
Why on earth would you want to fundamentally challenge your view of
yourself and the world? Why not just use the boxes your culture,
your experience and your peers have given you?
This is why it is very rare to come across someone who doesn't make
some sort of instantaneous judgment of other people, no matter how
subtle. It's a fundamental reflex of our reality building machine.
We need to know where the other person fits into our picture, so
that we can know who we are and where we are. We also want this
coherent picture to be running smoothly and unchallenged in the
background. We don't enjoy constantly breaking the fourth wall of
our own consciousness. Not knowing who we are and where we are, and
staying in that groundlessness and uncertainty, is deeply unsettling
for most people.
If we wanted to stop judging, we'd have to admit that our picture of
the world and of others is our picture and ours alone. We would have
to admit we are responsible for what we accept, what we reject, and
what we respond to. We would need to acknowledge that we are the
primary author of our own assumptions and projections. After we grow
to accept this, we would then be able to start the painstaking work
of deconstructing our own reality tunnel-sorting out what belongs to
us and what belongs to other people- and essentially questioning
everything we thought we knew about everyone we passed on the
street. The resistance we go through from ourselves (and from
others) during this process is can be quite frightening. In many
cultures and spiritual disciplines the process is likened to dying.
In the end however, our sense of other people and ourselves would
become much richer, more varied, far more open to who they are in
the moment instead of what we assume them to be. This would happen
because we'd start to concretely see that judgments are nothing more
than reflexes of convenience : very useful to a pragmatic degree but
often saying nothing about the larger, wilder world beyond them. But
to do this we would have to pass through the whole terrifying
business of confronting our own prejudices and returning to a less
certain and unpredictable view of the world and ourselves. Not many
people want to do that, or have the privilege of doing so. That's
why most people you meet make judgments.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-judge-other-people/answer/David-Hunter-69
love,
Larry Scott
P.S. David Hunters words about changing one's mind being like death
remind me of similar words heard during that during most intense and
very instructive debate between two long-time friends who are
opposites in many ways, Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Robert George, in
the Friends (Quaker) meeting house on the
Swarthmore College campus on
February 11, 2014. The instruction was on many things but was mainly
on how to fight and remain civil both at once, realizing that facing
changing one’s mind would be like dying. The video recording of the
event is at
Watch:
Cornel West and Robert George '77 Hold Collection on Campus.
That debate was NOT on the topic of judging other people, not
directly anyway.
David Hunter's answer is also reminiscent of
Larry
Scott's answer to Why do I feel that we're living in a fake
world?, which was based on something that you have seen many
times, but David Hunter's words seem to me to be more useful. LAS
