Judge Not

Today I’m reminded of a line from the New Testament: Judge not, that ye be not judged. Most of us find this very hard to live by. If you stay with me to the end, maybe together we can understand what Jesus really meant, and how to put it into practice in your own life.

Let’s start with a simple question: what is judgment, exactly? There are two kinds. The first is just sizing something up, like judging how far away the oncoming cars are before I turn left at a light. The second is deciding that someone is worth less than you, as in I judge you to be less intelligent, less beautiful, less important. The first kind is based on facts. The second is based on opinion.

Let’s focus on the second kind, because it’s the dangerous one. Say I decide I’m better than you because I’m more beautiful. Now I believe I’m simply worth more than someone I see as ugly. But “beautiful” only exists because of “ugly.” Without one, you can’t define the other, just like you can’t have “hot” without “cold.” There’s no scientific rule for what is beautiful or ugly. That’s the problem: it’s completely made up. These beliefs come from the ego (the part of us that needs to feel important), and they rest on nothing at all.

Here’s another problem with this kind of judgment: once you make it, it doesn’t go away. It has to keep feeding itself. If I decide I’m beautiful, and that makes me feel better than others, then I have to keep seeing other people as ugly so I can keep feeling superior. By my own made-up yardstick, they will always be less than me.

The same thing happens on a bigger scale. The more an Israeli sees a Palestinian as inferior, the more superior he feels, and the more he needs to keep seeing the Palestinian as inferior. And of course, the same is true the other way around. A Christian may feel superior to people of every other religion because she believes she and her group are going to heaven while everyone else is going to hell. This kind of judgment keeps feeding itself, and it WILL lead to conflict and violence. Two thousand years of human history prove it beyond any doubt. A Nazi SS officer first had to believe that Jews were less than human. Only then could he herd them into the gas chambers. A police officer must first see a Black man as less than human in his mind before he can treat him with cruelty.

You can see this same pattern in almost every part of life. We create a ladder of who is better and who is worse. Over time, as you can see in the world around you, that ladder takes on a life of its own. What counts as “beautiful” may change, but the need to feel superior stays the same. Every “better” needs a “worse,” and the two have to stay at odds for either one to exist. That’s why judgment creates conflict, and keeps it going.

Judging others ALWAYS leads to more judging. It’s like quicksand: once you step in, it pulls you down. You can’t stop until you either destroy yourself or start asking where your yardstick came from in the first place. That’s very hard to do, for two reasons. First, your whole sense of who you are depends on it. Second, it means really thinking things through, and that takes effort.

In our society, judging others is like water to a fish. It’s in the air we breathe. TV bombards us with it, and almost no one sees it for the poison it is. Many of the institutions we have today would fall apart if people really started questioning these made-up standards. Rigid, black-and-white religions would collapse, because one of their core beliefs is we are better than everyone else. The war industry survives because the people of one country have decided that the people of another country are worth less. In the worst cases, like genocide, human beings are treated as if their lives matter no more than insects’. That choice is what allows one nation to attack another. (Notice that I said choice on purpose. We are very good at blaming someone else for our problems. For example: “Illegal immigrants are the reason my life is harder,” rather than admitting that we quietly accept the enormous wealth gap between the richest 1% and everyone else.)

Because we keep sorting people into “better” and “worse,” we now live in a world where someone always has to win and someone always has to lose. It’s full of struggle and constant fighting with anyone who believes or lives differently. Just look at how much our movies and entertainment glorify violence. That alone shows how badly we need healing as a species. As a whole, our society is sick, and we are responsible for it. We can play the victim, but this epidemic of judgment is OUR FAULT.

When you see wars on TV and all the violence on our planet, and you’re looking for someone to blame, I suggest you look in a mirror. Don’t think of yourself as an innocent bystander with no part in it. As Krishna explains in the Bhagavad Gita, doing nothing is also a choice. All it takes for evil to grow is for good people to stand by and do nothing. If you have stood by, then somewhere deep down you have accepted that it’s okay to decide another human being deserves to die. You have believed the lie that you are powerless, and that makes you an unknowing partner in these crimes against humanity.

That said, if you’re reading this, you have already chosen to rise above living in fear. Some of you are further along than others. But eventually, you need to reach the point where you speak up in whatever way you can, and name the madness you see around you. If enough of us shine a light on it, we can expose judgment for what it is and leave it behind.

When people around you are full of judgment and throw anger and hatred your way, your job is to answer with love, compassion, kindness, and understanding. Except in extreme cases (narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths), don’t make the mistake of turning other people into the enemy, into “them.” That’s a trap. Instead, look at everyone, even those you think least deserve it, and find the humanity in them. You really have no other choice, because you know that judgment only breeds more judgment, and in the end, violence.

For example, try to see the human being in the criminal, the prostitute, the drug addict, and anyone else you’ve written off as worth less. It may be hard at first, but it gets easier with practice. Don’t expect it to be easy, because it isn’t. But we have to try anyway, because what people have been doing for thousands of years isn’t working. We need to do something different, something new.

So, as the great teacher from Galilee said: judge not. Let’s build a better world by leaving judgment behind!