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Judgement

It is easy to judge someone as good, or bad, or fun, or boring, or malicious or a criminal (like the legal system does). But putting a blanket judgement on a person shows an inherent misunderstanding of what a person is. A person is not good or bad - his or her ideas (beliefs, impulses etc.) are what are correct or incorrect (rational or irrational). It's the ideas that need to be corrected.

We need not stop at blaming the ideas (as opposed to the person). The ideas (in most cases) did not creatively emerge in the person's mind. They were installed there by mechanisms. And those mechanisms need to be corrected as well. For human beings those mechanisms are - culture (broadly, which encompasses things like - parenting, religion, social norms, beliefs etc.), negative life experiences like trauma, disease, other people with incorrect ideas etc.

So making a judgement on a person and blaming the person is the same as making a judgement on badly cooked pasta and blaming the pasta for it. It is not the pasta that is to be blamed but the fault lies in the ingredients (the ideas) and the chef (the mechanism which input the ideas). (Now it is another story that the chef is a person also, and his ideas about how to cook pasta were installed in him through other sets of mechanisms....but you get the picture).

So taking the example of the justice system - blaming a "criminal" and punishing him/her as a "solution" to the bad behavior is actually counter productive since it lets the actual criminals (the bad ideas and the mechanisms that installed those in the person's mind) have a free pass. The focus should be on correcting the ideas and the mechanisms, not blaming  and punishing "criminals". Bad behavior should be corrected by removing the incorrect ideas from the person's head and replacing them with correct ones. And this cannot be done with coercion. It has to happen through the person's own creativity - we just have to make it possible for that to happen. 


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