#6 Why do humans judge?

And make each other's life miserable.

In the last newsletter, I had come a full circle from where I started and life, in that sense, looked like a constant conflict between your true self and the conventions of society. But why does it have to be? Why can’t we, as humans, just let people be? If we collectively decide to look at every person for what they are instead of judging them, wouldn’t the world be a happier place to live in for everyone? Why do we label things/people as soon as we discover them? Why are humans so judgemental inherently? 

As I contemplated finding an answer to this puzzle, I realised that we, as humans are always on autopilot, assessing everything around us. We look at people and without even consciously trying, we just label them: fat, thin, short, tall, rich, poor, yellow teeth, bad breath, bright smile and the like. Even at the time of writing this newsletter, I was sitting at a cafe, observing people and mentally mocking them with my unasked for judgements. Even though I fully understood that being judgemental is considered bad, but honestly I’m yet to meet a non-judgemental person. They form a part of our DNA and we love to labels things, gossip and giggle. But how and why does it happen? I tried to think of it from first principles to decode what really happens when a judgement is made/expressed? Let’s take an example with an overbearing Mike and a highly sexual Erica:

This seemed like an utterly stereotypical reality which we never question except for using it in feminism debates. But I tried hard to break it down:

1. Travel and Transformation - As soon as Mike utters those magical words, sound waves travel through the air and hit Erica’s outer ear. Now, her ear performs its job of converting the sound energy to a neural signal that her conditioned brain receives later.

   

2. Meaning Finder - Erica’s developed brain of twenty-one years is smart enough to know the meaning of the word slut and searches through its 20,000-word dictionary until it hits the recognition point. Uh-Oh.

   

3. Judgement-maker - Even until the meaning-finder step, things remain neutral but as soon as it hits the judgment maker department all hell breaks loose as the conditioning associated with that meaning pumps a strong concoction of negative sensations in Erica’s body.

   

   If in another dimension, say, the act of being a slut remained the same but it becomes socially desirable, then Erica’s judgement-maker would have pumped all kinds of sweetness in her veins. She would have blushed and replied,
   'Thanks, man. I try!’
   But in the here and now of 2021, the story is the exact opposite. So, the judgement-maker rules our reaction to external stimuli. In Buddhism, this judgement-maker is called a collection of Saṅkhāra which are mental imprints, dispositions or conditioned things constructed on the basis of our experiences with the world. Simply speaking, anything which generates a pleasant sensation is put in the ‘good’ box and anything which generates an unpleasant sensation is put in the ‘bad’ box. Some stereotypical examples for Erica:
   Good - virgin, fair, thin, docile.
   Bad - slutty, dark, fat, wilful.

4. Reaction - Coming back to the unpleasantness of Erica bodily sensations: boiling blood, increased heart rate and warm breath. In order to do away with this, the brain again calculates what action to perform based on past experiences, self-image, future goals etc. And our poor Erica, utters a sorrowful reply:

   

   After breaking it down, I realised that Erica essentially reacted to the sensations of her own body. The thought of it was liberating for a moment, to be solely responsible for your sorrows. That, it actually is all in your mind. If somehow by some magical fault, the judgement-maker (Step 3) decided to associate bliss with every meaning (Step 2), then we’d be happy forever. Our bodies brimming with true joy at every comment which is made. Now, that’s what we’d call being high on life. Imagine, someone calls you a slut and you’re smiling. Someone else calls you pious and you’re smiling. Genuinely smiling, not acting like you don’t care or suppressing the unpleasantness and faking a smile. Being rich is the same as being poor. Being famous is the same as being unknown. Being fat is the same as being muscular. End of judgement for one and all, beginning of chaos and beauty. It’s so rosy to imagine it but there must be some utility to the unpleasantness of pain, throbbing, stabbing, aching, pinching pain which broadly exists in two forms:

   1. Physical Pain: It hurts Mike when Erica decides to teach him a lesson.

A tiny glimpse into a world without physical pain: stabbing yourself in the stomach for the thrill of seeing blood oozing out of you, cutting off your limbs like cutting a piece of cake, walking barefoot on smouldering coal, lying on the road to let cars drive over you and I can go on but you get the point, right? In the absence of physical pain, evolutionarily speaking, there would have been no Priyanshi Sharma writing this newsletter and there would have been no you to read this.

2. Emotional Pain: When Mike calls Erica a slut, it hurts. When he calls her a slut in front of the world, it hurts a lot more.

As discussed before, human beings evolved to value social approval as it enhanced their chances of survival during tribal living. Therefore, being insulted results in pain. But why was social approval invented in the first place? Why did the tribe accept or reject members? Why didn’t we just accept every human being we met as our own and lived without judgement at least for our own species? As I tried to imagine a world where a tribe accepts every human being and they live in complete harmony, I started to see the red flags. Say, in that tribe, a member Tyler exists whose true calling is to dance and he loves to hop to the click-clock of his tongue. On the other hand, there’s Bran, a strong, masculine, agile hunter who provides food and keeps the tribe safe. Now, by basic laws of survival, anyone who is conducive to survival is good (the hunter) and anyone who is non-conducive to survival is bad (dancer). So, duality exists in life itself. Life is good. Death is bad. This becomes the root cause of all approval and disapproval.

Further ahead, people usually judge to make them feel better about themselves. Their gossiping and judgements are never about the other person but always about them, feeding their social approval to themselves. Aah, what a wonderful place the mind is.

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Stay tuned for the next newsletter!