Life is an adventure. It’s rigorous, exciting, interesting and prolific. It’s also solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes, Leviathan). I believe there’s truth in every dream and every nightmare. The one act that changes the trajectory of it all though, starts with how we choose to perceive. And how we choose to perceive life, is based on judgment.
We “grow up” and start thinking that we are living in some harsh, objective, dismissive reality, but are we? One of the most incredible phrases I ever heard someone say about another was that “everywhere they go, there they are!” Faulty narratives, ethical relativism, ethnocentrism, blind privilege, diplomatic sovereignty and even quantum uncertainty aside, as a species we’ve basically been growing recently only all too aware of what we’re not really aware of. We’re likely on this platform of life for one real purpose and one real purpose only: to connect, regardless of what’s real. If you can really internalize and remember this, you won’t ever lose sight of what’s important.
But maybe you don’t buy into that yet. Maybe you're hurt and not really ready yet to connect. Maybe connecting drains you. Maybe you believe we are all here to learn. To that one asks - to learn what? What if you’re stupid? Maybe we are all here to love. - To love what? What happens when you aren’t loved? Who has this whole story right? What is right?
How difficult is it for us all to trust each other. How basic is this search for truth. Whether this is a result of willful misdirection, ineptitude, or inadequacy - it doesn’t matter. We are all guilty victims, and we all need to get over it. We should have learned to be careful though, as searching for what’s right will almost always deteriorate into control by design.
Control is an illusion.
None of us are omnificent. We all stem from a singular perspective which must by definition be inherently incomplete and therefore fundamentally flawed. Even when we feel 100% certain that we are 100% correct, we really just can’t be. Man has been trying for several ages. Perhaps it’s time to face the truth.
I believe the feminist philosophers have had a refreshing and insightful take on how to proceed.
But before we get to that, let’s uncover as much as we can from all that’s behind it all. I think it all stems from and goes back to judgment.
Somewhere along the line, I’ve learned that I’m always wrong when I judge.
And no, I’m not suffering with a lack of self esteem, nor am I too stupid to realize we all judge almost all the time. I’m saying that judgment is so deeply, inherently flawed and ubiquitous at its core that I daresay it's the snake quietly winding itself around the neck of any sleeping victim.
There have been many thinkers contributing their judgment on judgment. The stacks of these thoughts trail back hundreds of years. Aristotle saw judgment as a part of practical wisdom. He considered good judgment an intellectual virtue enabling reason based off what is good, beneficial, right despite fluctuations in situations - for human flourishing. Do we trust Aristotle’s, judgment on judgement?
Kant valued duty, universally ethical imperatives, and rules. Clearly Kant had control issues, and it doesn't take much before we are sacrificing our children to a random ax murderer as opposed to lying to him about how they're hidden in safety away in a closet. Why? To not lie? Kant clearly can’t have this right. Staunch loyalty to any particular duty might make for fun fiction, but it’s narrow, blind and immature at its core. No one is any one thing.
There’s utilitarianism, which values the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Seems logical, right - even if it feels cold, easy, and impersonal. Carol Gilligan’s Care Ethics which lays the framework to put judgement in a more contextually relevant space before assigning the “right.”
But we also cannot value utility above all because of the paradoxes. We intuitively know that a mother who would sacrifice her own child even for five strangers would be considered not just a terrible mother but just out of alignment with any kind of moral ground, and not just from the perspective of the child being sacrificed but humanity as a whole would judge her. Nobody would even want to be around a person who they know would sacrifice them for total strangers. Therefore, if you are that kind of person, you're demonstrating an unsustainable personality trait, and that alone could never be universal, or sustainable, or amenable, or dutiful. This logic circulates basically like a tornado into destruction because it justifies immoral actions.
And backing up all way to Aristotle's views leaves many thinkers have questioning anthropocentric views that prioritize staunch universal rigidity or even privilege human flourishing. Perspectives like deep ecology or ecocentrism argue that all living beings or ecosystems have intrinsic value, and shouldn't be judged solely by how well they serve human needs or growth.
One thinker in particular put this vulnerability to the test.
Daniel Quinn illuminates the structural problems with the Us-Them dichotomy running through all of these paradigms and mirrors our most fundamental issue. He does this by creating a fictional philosophical discourse between a man and a gorilla. When seen through this carefully constructed lens, Quinn highlights the absurdity of myopic adherence to unsustainable disregard for laws of population growth. He illuminates a likely reason for the story of Caine and Abel as pastoral communities saw the trajectory of the agricultural revolution, and tried to warn tge Semites against it. But this oral mythology didn’t work to dissuade the Protestant work ethic as they’ve always believed that their way is the right way. They-we believe that we have dominion over the land based on two truths: we can and we want to. As we “evolved” from what he calls Leaver Culture to Taker Culture, we did this first by breaking away as judgers, wrongfully assuming both omniscience and freewill as apriori; claiming logic to be universal or categorically imperative - toxically male, flawed attempt at domination and ultimately doomed paradigm.
See god is a necessity by design. What else could be infinite, omnipotent, and omnipresent, and omnivorous? Giving way and space for others simply because you know you don’t know all can be a beautiful state of being. From there, life can be a beautiful utopia. Fear is natural, but grace is wise. We’ve spent centuries now in pursuit of ease and pleasure, comfort and everlasting life. But there’s a price. We see it. We know it now even if we didn’t always. It’s dumb in the face obvious that this cannot last.
Think knowledge is power? Try ignorance is bliss! Trust me, it’s an easier argument.
Feminist philosophers, like those in Care Ethics or pluralistic philosophy, argue that traditional logic often prioritizes detachment and universal rules, which they see as reflecting a specific, historically male perspective. They propose redefining logic to integrate context, relationships, and empathy as valid and essential components of reasoning.
Instead of vain attempts to impart power over our situation, try doing your best to habitually infuse it.
First try remembering that empowering yourself and others can only stem from your own happiness. We see this happen naturally when we begin to notice the moments that we happen to be ok. There are moments when we’re not thinking about much. Even if it seems less and less these moments can happen and furthermore, they can happen by design. When you are deeply “ok” it’s easier to infuse power to someone who is not. And if you’re not, value yourself first enough to fix that. Stop. Meditate. Pray. Ask for help. Most importantly - stop! Stop acting when you are angry, fearful, sad, even casually uninvested won’t likely lead anywhere good.
Reflect now for a moment and compare the decisions you made while you were happy, to the decisions you made in moments of negativity or frustration. There’s a big difference in most outcomes, right? Try making it a kind of rule to always be coming from a good place before you act. Do this for a while. I don’t ask you to comprehend this rationality. Empirical knowledge is the only way I’ve learned to learn. And I teach! Do it for a while, and just test to see if it works out. Soon, you’ll feel that place that you are coming from to act your best ultimately, is the real you.
…And if you truly deeply think about this even once, you’ll soon see that you can apply this thought to your every moment. You can emerge with something so simple, so beautiful, but so powerful that you’ll never forget and never live in quite the same way again.
Look behind things. It’s hard to just believe any religion, or affiliation, or even person because when you really start to see how inherently flawed any one perspective is. Judgement was the inherently flawed fruit. We are none of us equipped, able, or sustainably apt to judge. So stop. Try loving instead.
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