The price of judgment

In my article “The age of reason” I gave my version of the mechanics involved in bringing about paradigm shifts. I am using “paradigm” in the general sense not the “hard fact” scientific sense. That was a “how it happens” article. This article is a “why it happens” approach.

My research through old documents from all religions seems to indicate a common theme; that judgment is the root cause of our problems. The most familiar version in the Christian paradigm is "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it" (Genesis 217 KJV). I read this as judgment.

But if judgment is the problem then any answer to the problem must be free of judgment. This means no religion, no philosophy, no right or wrong, no good and evil. It had to be a “stand alone” answer.

As well as that, “judgment” has many meanings so it is necessary to find the type of judgment that plays havoc with the human race. So I am looking for what I call “toxic” judgment.

This is my hypothesis.

If a human does not know something they make a wild guess. They then claim their wild guess is true. From then on every time they make a decision based on their judgment they will mess up because they are making decisions based on a wild guess and not based on reality.

That was the general hypothesis. From there I looked for specific types of wild guess. I identified two types of wild guess that divorced us from reality:

1. finding in the negative because we cannot prove the positive; and
2. finding in the positive because we cannot prove the negative.

I called the first of these “The Hiroshima Principle”.

The Hiroshima Principle: judging the negative to be true because we cannot prove the positive.

We can never know if a new technology will have detrimental side effects because, until the technology is introduced, the detrimental side effects do not exist. It is impossible to prove the existence of something that does not yet exist.

Scientists tell us that there is no proof of any harm associated with the introduction of genetic engineering, therefore genetic engineering is safe. That there is no proof of harm is true. There is no proof of harm because until genetic engineering is introduced whatever harm there may be does not exist.

I call it the “Hiroshima Principle,” because before Hiroshima and Nagasaki the scientists who invented the atom bomb thought there would be a big bang and it would be over. They had no idea about radiation sickness, acid rain or any of the other side effects of nuclear weapons would occur because before Hiroshima and Nagasaki these side effects did not exist. None of the scientists predicted radiation sickness and acid rain any more than anyone can predict the fallout from genetic engineering.

The second form of toxic judgment I call “The reverse Hiroshima Principle”.

The Reverse Hiroshima Principle: judging the positive to be true because we cannot prove the negative.

Someone robs a bank. They are caught, tried, found guilty and thrown into jail. I see no problem with that. But using the Reverse Hiroshima Principle, we are found guilty and thrown into jail because someone said we were thinking about robbing a bank.
It is improbable that you are thinking about robbing a bank, but it is impossible for you to prove you are not.

I will run through a case study using the recent history of Iraq as a base to show how the Reverse Hiroshima Principle really fouls things up.

The weapons inspectors in Iraq said they could not find any weapons of mass destruction, but needed more time to make certain. This to me is a perfect response. There is doubt, so let's make certain.

A captive under torture gives the CIA information that Saddam Hussein had mobile laboratories running around the desert producing weapons of mass destruction. Nobody seems to have told the CIA that people being tortured have a habit of telling their torturers whatever the torturers want to hear.

Colin Powell then goes to the UN with a slick presentation of trucks driving around the desert, and nobody could prove it wasn't true. This is the Reverse Hiroshima Principle. It was accepted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because it could not be proved he didn't.

The “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq but did not find any weapons of mass destruction. George Bush then goes on television to say that while there where not any weapons of mass destruction there was indisputable evidence that Saddam Hussein was thinking about producing weapons of mass destruction (The Reverse Hiroshima Principle again). Without the Reverse Hiroshima Principle the Bush/Blair/Howard war in Iraq would not have happened.

The Reverse Hiroshima Principle leads the human race into acting insanely. The worst aspect of it is that there is nothing that can be done about it. If someone makes a toxic judgment based on what another person is thinking, what their motivations are, what they were trying to do or any other judgment that cannot be proved there is no defense. There is no such thing as “innocent until proved guilty” with the Reverse Hiroshima Principle.

I believe this is an original hypothesis, so if you try to research the contents the only likely reference that will come up will be my book The Fall of Man. Other may be working along similar lines but I am unaware of such works. If there are others working along similar lines I would be interested to see what they are doing.

What happens if a group of wild guesses that are claimed to be true are bought together in the human brain? We call it a belief system. It is not really a “belief” system but a glob of toxic judgments. When more than one person club together and share similar their globs of toxic judgment the result is called group think, or a paradigm. This is where I began with my previous article, "The age of reason".

Paradigms. Globs of toxic judgment held by a group of people and claimed to be true. Every time I touch on this subject I have to say that I am talking about the social science use of paradigm not the hard science meaning.

The next stage is cognitive dissonance. Cognition occurs that does not conform to our paradigm and there is conflict. When the conflict is small we ignore it believing it will go away. As the conflict increases we fight to maintain our paradigm in any way we can. Many of the tactics we use are not very pleasant.

If in the conflict the old paradigm is overcome and a new paradigm formed there is no reason why the new should be any better than the old. Who can claim that their globs of toxic judgment are any better than anyone else's globs?

According to my hypothesis the root cause of the mess the human race is in is that we make wild guesses and claim them to be true. This is what I understand as eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The solutions would seem to be to stop making wild guesses and when we do not know something say “I do not know”. But how do you persuade someone who has made a wild guess and judged it to be true that it is not true and he/she does not know? Mission impossible. We do not even know if what we think we know are wild guesses.

There is one small hope that I can see. Maybe if enough of the human race decided that they have had enough of the horrors that judgment brings we might do our best not to accept judgments and to admit that we do not know.

That would be a big ask because it would mean the end of religion, the end of philosophy, the end of governmental spin and a completely new way of thinking. Or maybe it would be a return to the way we thought before the invention of judgment.

Religion and philosophy are one and the same. They are systems that attempt to tell us how we got here and why we are here. They are both wild guesses about the unknowable. Governments and politics do the same thing. “Left” and “right” is basically a system of telling us who we are. If the left and right in politics ever found common ground that worked their identity would be gone.

If Jews and Palestinians understood that both labels are just labels they would have nothing to fight about and they would all be just people who lived in a certain area of the planet. The possibility of the Jews, Palestinians or any other groups forgetting the labels and saying “I am who I am” seems very remote. But that is what it will take to bring peace to this world.

There also a possible solution in the idea that instead of making judgments we could decide what we want. Do we want to kill each other or do we want to live in peace? Do we want poverty and oppression or do we want freedom and prosperity? Can we make decisions based on what we want to create rather than make wild guesses about things we know nothing about?

The price would be high. As individuals we would have to make decisions based on what we understood at that moment instead of running on automatic. There would also the understanding that it would be a continuous process of modification as we learnt and understood more. It would be hard work.

With paradigms we are running on automatic. Our wild guess that we claim to be true has been made in advance and we will act automatically according to how our paradigms tell us to perceive outside stimuli. Nice and easy. There is no need to think, and we always have the perfect reason why we are right. Our own judgment makes us our own judge and jury and we will naturally find ourselves innocent of all sin no matter what we do.

Can the human race learn to think and make decisions? I have no idea. That is a decision that can only be made on a personal level. If the human race is to change it will have to do so one person at a time.

There may be some who do think, but largely I see a large body of people reacting unthinkingly to wild guesses the way that Skinner trained his mice to run through a maze. At the end of the maze the mice received a piece of cheese, we get war and poverty. That is the price of judgment.