If you want to get to the root of all judgment, we’ll have to take a look at fear. Fear gives us two options. We can try to understand what this fear may be. The latter option, and the option we tend to choose the most, is to label, criticize, and categorize what we don’t understand. When we categorize what we don’t understand, we start believing we control it. Fear makes us vulnerable, but we try to retain our self-esteem by judging what makes us weak. When things don’t go our way, we don’t seek to understand why; we instead say things like this are unacceptable. Instead of trying to understand a person’s lifestyle, we automatically label it as wrong.

When we look deeper into judgment, we start to see an underlying fear that we have difficulty expressing or even admitting. As a culture, we certainly don’t know how to handle emotions. It’s very easy to say that we are afraid of them because we are afraid of spontaneity. We don’t know how to deal with a negative emotion, especially when we weren’t expecting it. Because we fear tears or anger, we label the person expressing these emotions as too emotional.

A man who shows no emotion and belittles a boy for crying is only afraid to be vulnerable himself. We’ll call a woman a slut because they aren’t afraid to show off parts of themselves that we’ve disowned in ourselves. We judge others as loners and losers because we are afraid to be excluded. Superiority is also important in our culture because there’s a fear of becoming powerless without it. When we start to see judgment this way, it’s clear that it is a mirror reflecting inner fear.

Since we fear what we don’t know, what we don’t know becomes our enemy. It’s the true reason we are afraid of death. We don’t understand death, and so we treat it as an evil entity. We recite lyrics retelling, “I never sleep because sleep is the cousin of death.” Everything we don’t understand becomes a threat. Instead of an exciting mystery, we greet life as a horror movie with jump scares. Only when we become open to all we don’t know will we see its inherent perfection. Until then, we will continue to close it off because it’s safer to feel superior than uncertain. Even when our certainty is not at all objective.

What we judge in others is the exact thing we disown in ourselves. A person can discredit their intelligence because it hides them from their ignorance. I’ve been in plenty of work situations where a colleague would belittle another colleague because they feel the need to be perfect. They’ve disowned any possibility of making a mistake, thus bringing upon a sense of impostor syndrome when a mistake eventually does happen. Instead of admitting any mistake, it’s more profitable to hide it. Or worse, bring up someone else’s mistake as a distraction from our own.

We judge the unhoused as lazy only because we cannot rest. If we are all about the grind, shouldn’t they also be? Judgment restrains us from having any compassion because we believe that if we attack it out there, there’s no need to deal with it inside. And so, this form of judgment is merely a projection of repressed thoughts and feelings.

This is no different than people who believe they are more spiritual or righteous than others. We don’t like to admit it, but it comes from the same intention. I’m more righteous than you, only to prove that I’m afraid of my wickedness. Because I’m imperfect, I will inevitably do wrong, but I must ensure nobody sees. If someone calls me out to hurt their feelings, it’s not my fault. It was them who were in the wrong. It’s more important to remain on my moral high ground to be perceived as good.

As a result, I must punish and badmouth what I perceive as evildoing so that my “integrity” can shine as the opposite of what I perceive as evil. And so I stand on the corner, talking through a megaphone, telling everyone willing to hear that they are going to hell. I denounce gay relationships, Planned Parenthood, and anything considered “woke,” not because I understand any of it but because I’m right and they’re wrong.

Fear itself isn’t a negative emotion. It’s just another emotion we don’t understand. We don’t need to react to our fear because our fear is subjective and based on our limited knowledge. What if we could sit with our fear and wonder why this emotion is coming up within us? Even better, what if we could sit with it until it dissolves because, just like all emotion, fear is impermanent? There will come a time when we won’t need it. Instead, we are embedded into every fiber of our lives. When we face our fears, there is no need to judge. When we honor our fear, we give room to start loving, and perfect love casts out all fear.

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