The price of judgment

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.