It’s easy to judge another person. It’s easy to take what other people say at face value. Our personal biases protect us from over-analyzing the situation and reach for a conclusion that we could make a decision quickly.
It might make you feel good that you have moral superiority. It might make you feel honorable that you have adhered to strict moral standards in your life when listening to what you deem as amoral stories of others.
Perhaps, you go back home thinking to yourself, what a good human being you have been. Taking a good night's rest and forgetting about all that you did.
But you never know. You will never know the back story of each individual. Because you attempt to conform a fellow human being to your own yardstick of evaluating an individual. We are all too human, we fall into this trap over and over again.
You believe what you believe to be right or wrong because you have seen it being replicated time and time again. But unless you are a computer processor, the amount of data that you could retain with a high accuracy remains to be flawed. Unless you are trained and executed that muscle of interpretation regularly, like those of negotiation agents, the probability of making a wrong judgment remains to be, perhaps above average.
Unless, you expose yourself to different permutations of context, background, upbringing, and culture, what you think of as an idealistic plane of living could simply fall flat. You might generalize the population and historical events based on the limited scope of observations that you perhaps deem sufficient.
But when you look through the limited scope of observations, your conclusion is just that, limited.
You forgot to be curious about each individual. You forgot the same action and behavior could be triggered and motivation is very different and multi-faceted variations of the makeup of an individual. You forgot that 2 is not merely derived from 1 + 1, but could be an endless permutation of fractional value.
Sometimes you don’t know that the coldest individual might have the softest heart. The most optimistic person might be the one to have cried the most tears. The silliest person in the crowd might hold the greatest burden in life.
Sometimes you just don’t know unless you have a full understanding of the events that happen in the life of the individual.
Sometimes you don’t know that love could perhaps be a learned response that some people never got to learn when growing up. And that relearning it as an adult is difficult, like teaching an old dog new tricks. You take certain things for granted, for perhaps growing up has been almost perfect for you.
You perhaps, don’t understand how much each individual has been broken. And that how carefully they have built walls to protect themselves from shattering again. It’s easy to say that it’s easy to do the right thing. But the truth is, it’s not easy. If it’s easy, everyone will have the perfect life that you deem as moral. But you will never know if all you want to achieve, whether consciously or subconsciously, is to prove how right you are in your observations.
Then, even in that, what is moral is constitute of what the society has constructed to be moral. As much as we were to draw a line between what is right or wrong. We could be as much wrong as we think we are right.
The next time, you want to make a sweeping statement that could potentially hurt someone, just remember that you probably don’t know enough to know.
