Judgements.

One of the countless facebook philosophy pics
that litter my feed...

I came up against a conundrum recently, whereby someone posed to me the age old philosophy of "judge not lest ye be judged" or the more public-friendly "If you've got anything wrong with you, you better not say I have anything wrong with me, because that's hypocrisy!" I'm just gonna take a little bit of time to talk about this.

First of all, no, it's not hypocrisy. Anyone who thinks so doesn't understand the term hypocrisy. If I was to say "Don't judge me, because you're ugly" THAT would be hypocrisy. Saying "You're not allowed to judge someone unless you're perfect" is just bad logic, not hypocrisy.

But why is it bad logic? Well, for a start, it's self-solving. The reason why it's said, is because nobody is perfect (unless you're uber leftwinged, and believe that everyone is perfect in their own way... that's for another time.) and by saying nobody is perfect, you remove the right for anyone to judge anyone. But if no one can judge anyone, how will we get anything done at all? Can you imagine being on a jury panel, and hearing a criminal tell the Honourable presiding "you can't judge me, yeah, cos you ain't perfect!"
What a stupid sentiment!

How do we establish whether
we want to do these things?

Not only that, but I think people forget that to say something nice about someone is also a judgement. I mean, would the same theory go that if you've got pleasant qualities, you should not make reference to someone's positive traits? I can't imagine that ever being the case. If it is, we have a problem. But it should be if we wish to continue such a terrible idea, then we must make sure it's very well balanced. That would be the token of a proper philosophy.

Not only that, it's important to judge people. If no one judged anyone, we would be left with unreasonable expectations of the world. We all have negative qualities, as referenced before. So why is anyone then afraid of having negative qualities? What's wrong with having them? I, for instance, am incredibly geeky. I'm almost insufferable at times, I rant too often, I'm also putting on weight, have a receding hair line, a beard (some don't like this) and a lot of extreme views which many may not understand or share. But by accepting these "problems", I can turn them into positives. It won't help me to make people like me, but I no longer care that these people don't like me. The requirement for their approval is non existent.

Why would you show me an idiot?

So how about a better philosophy? How about instead we say "If you're willing to judge me, know I will judge you, and pray that my perceptive capabilities are less astute than yours."

Or a more public friendly version, "judge me, I don't care, I'm not 12 years old."