We Should Judge Less

Judge not, lest ye waste precious mental energy

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

William James

One way we insidiously torment ourselves is by judging everything and everyone. Even the ancient Stoics - who these days we’d say were a pretty judgmental lot - saw advantages in not judging.

It is possible to entertain no thought about this, and not to be troubled in spirit; for things of themselves are not so constituted as to create our judgements upon them.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.52

Some modern advice-givers, however, encourage judging. Andrew Perlot, for example, thinks failure to judge is a “disservice to ourselves and society,” “a surefire way to become ungrounded and confused,” and, something he considers to be “obvious: the impossibility of nonjudgment.”

There are things - a lot of things in fact - that you should judge, and failure to do so will cause all sorts of problems. For example, you should judge whether it is safe to cross the street or whether that bus is likely to hit you. You should judge which candidate for office will likely produce better outcomes. You should judge whether reading some article - including this one! - is worth your time.

Some judgments are made easily; others require lots of effort, particularly if they are to be made well. You have only so much energy and only so much time you can devote to making decisions. It’s in your best interests to conserve those things for where it really matters.

However, the attention economy is designed to lure you in, dangling as bait all sorts of things that hit your buttons. It wants you to be judgmental, angry, and upset. These judgments drive engagement. On Substack, engagement drives subscritipons. That’s how fame and fortune are made. It’s no mystery why the top Substack bestsellers are partisan political newsletters.

Even with far less pulling on their attention than what we experience today, the ancient Greeks were aware that it was best not to get their attention sucked into such things. One of their most famous ideas is known as the Fundamental Rule (also referred to as the Dichotomy of Control). It’s best known from Stoicism, but it appears in many other Greek philosophies of life. The idea is commonsensical, but it’s amazing the degree to which it requires conscious effort to employ.

The Fundamental Rule

Some things are up to you (or are your business, or are under your control). Some things aren’t. You will benefit by concentrating your efforts on what is up to you and divesting yourself of efforts on things that are not up to you.

In other words, stop wasting your time judging things that you don’t have any influence over. And - if you investigate this thoroughly - you’ll find that a huge proportion of the things you’re giving your attention to, you can do nothing about. If you stop wasting your efforts, you’ll enable yourself to become a better person.

The ancient Pyrrhonist philosophers excelled at devising techniques to help people avoid wasting their time judging things. Their method is based on the observation that we have two fundamentally different kinds of thoughts. One type of thought is based on empirical observations. They’re about things we can sense - including what other people say. The other type of thought is about things that aren’t empirical. These include theories and stories of causality, ideas about how the world really is (as opposed to just how it seems to be), and, most importantly, judgments of whether something is really good or bad (as opposed to seeming that way, to you, at this time, under these circumstances). Thoughts about these things are thoughts that cannot be proven to be true, and are at a remove from our empirical reality. Yet, they are capable of sucking in our attention and luring us to spend time judging them. Because of this, the Pyrrhonists developed spiritual exercises to help practitioners suspend judgment about these things.

My mother had a couple of striking personality traits that seemed to me to go together. One was that she was judgmental. Towards the end of her life, as she began to succumb to vascular dementia, her conversation became increasingly simplistic, making it very clear where the well-worn ruts were in her thinking. Talking to her turned into a string of binary reactions to whatever was said. “That’s good. That’s bad.”

The other trait was that she was anxious. I suspect this second trait was caused by the first trait. If you’re not judging things negatively, how can they make you anxious?

You can relieve anxiety by giving up judging things that aren’t your business, and a deep exploration of the Fundamental Rule will point out to you just how little in life really is your business.

As the Hsin Hsin Ming says:

The Great Way is not difficult for those who do not pick and choose. When preferences are cast aside, the Way stands clear and undisguised. But even slight distinctions made set earth and heaven far apart. If you would clearly see the truth, discard opinions pro and con. To founder in dislike and like is nothing but the mind’s disease. And not to see the Way’s deep truth disturbs the mind’s essential peace. The Way is perfect like vast space, where there’s no lack and no excess. Our choice to choose and to reject prevents our seeing this simple truth.

The above is a sculpture symbolizing justice, from the Austrian Palace of Justice. She’s not decided yet. Note how calm she is. She focuses only on the things she has to make a decision on.