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
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
