I struggled with the judgement of others as long as I can remember. It started with being the “Russian” kid, went on to “being different” in secondary school and I don’t really think it ever stopped after that. The judgement of others gave me a lot of scars and I’m sure I produced a lot of them in return, until I realized what kind of dynamic was going on there. When I was faced with the constantly negative judgement of being different I didn’t want to be the outsider. I was still a kid, I wanted to belong to the others, have friends who are the same and treat me like that. At some point I just realized that I would never have that feeling with “normal” kids. In group dynamics I always seemed to be the one outside, the kid alone. I started to drift towards characters who where different themselves and soon enough we realized that we were more aware of the negative sides this life had. In fact I became depressed and felt always alone and misunderstood ever since, until quite recently.
There were of course these like-minded characters, who all drifted into some “revoluzzer” state, they dressed differently, they talked differently and they started to read weird stuff. At some point I was so depressed that I started wearing only black. It just expressed what my feelings were at the time. Suddenly people started asking me whether I was a “goth” and whether I listened to this-and-that, goth-music. I became interested and found myself in a subculture full of depressed people, who express that they are different. They were basically judging society with the harsh eye of someone who is trying to get out of there but can’t. They created a new sense of belonging between each other rather than trying to belong “to the normal kids”.
As a teenager I was quite impressed with all that, until I realized that the subculture that tried to be so different in fact reproduced the same dynamics as the society that they were trying to escape. There were those that fit too well into this whole thing. They tried too hard and then passed judgement onto the ones who just lived a normal life as well. After a while it was also obvious that all this is quite a money-cow. You can sell these people a lot of stuff that they don’t need and they will happily buy it, because they’re in fact no different from the “normal” kids out there. They all want to belong and they would pay any price to have admiration at least for one day at some music festival. The music itself was repetitive in nature: the same stereotypes, the same feelings produced, just different voices, different settings, different people. After a while all this was old for me. And no different.
In these years I became more and more detached from what people would call the mainstream culture. I don’t listen to pop music unless it is of very high quality. I despise the mind numbing effect of radio and TV. I don’t read “novels” and I really handle media in general carefully. To be honest this is quite normal for a Media and Cultural Studies graduate, who was mainly interested in Media Critique as a starting point. I carefully use the internet as a tool rather than a place. If I had to use only one phrase to describe my relationship to mainstream culture I would describe it as “mindful awareness”. I mostly don’t take it seriously and pick out the nice bits for me.
Where does all this negativity towards mainstream culture come from? Hurt feelings! They didn’t want to play with me so now I don’t play with them. I was an angry teenager shouting: “They say I’m different? Well, true, I’m better …!” and to be honest, their judgement made me a “better” person, if you count being aware of the positives and negatives of this society as “better”. The only problem is though, that awareness doesn’t make you happy. If you spend your days and nights thinking about what’s wrong with this society, you will become a deeply negative and disappointed person. No wonder that “goths” tend to be depressive: They ask for it. They want to be depressed about the state of mainstream culture!
In fact the dynamic of being different is a vicious circle: They don’t think you belong to them, so they treat you like that. As a result of them treating you in this fashion you decide that you don’t want to belong to them. Now they get even more annoyed at you because you don’t want to belong to their little club and think that you’re better than them, so they treat you even worse! This strengthens your judgement about them being just a bunch of judgemental idiots … and so on. In the end I became someone who passed judgement on society. I judged their politics, their stupid TV programs, their mating rituals, their fashion, their music, well, their lives. I honestly didn’t like what I saw as well. It was full of group dynamics that made it almost impossible for any human being to grow into a reasonable person.
What does Big Brother and Pop Idols say about our society? I recently even found myself on a date – I really wasn’t expecting it, because it was in Germany and Germans really don’t do dates normally – I found it highly amusing that this guy was trying to impress me with absolutely ridiculous things. My “harsh” judgement is in fact realistic. Think about it: Think about TV programmes and our daily murder on TV, think about morning radio shows or the complicated dating rituals people put themselves through? Does that really seem like the product of the efforts of a highly intelligent species? No, in fact it is the point where our individual intelligence is taken over by a group intelligence that doesn’t seem as sophisticated and sharp.
Let’s take a moment and think about group dynamics: A single ant for example isn’t really intelligent – it only has a simple nervous system that is far from the sophistication of our human brains. A group of ants though can build and coordinate and do stuff that seems rather intelligent. Ants show swarm intelligence. A group needs to think about communication and coordination and there usually is a bottleneck: Messages change when they’re passed on, the media prove it every day! Our group coordination is of course more sophisticated than that of ants (they communicate solely through pheromones), but if you consider Big Brother and morning radio shows it also seems worse than how the brain coordinates its efforts. Our human swarm intelligence produces behaviour that is rather ridiculous compared to what a single rational human being can achieve.
And there we see the slippery slope that every human being has to face: The balance between individuation and culture. Humans are social beings: they go mental when they are alone and start talking to themselves. At the same time families, groups, subcultures and even nations and entire cultures produce a group behaviour that seems rather frightening to me. Just watch a Leni Riefenstahl film and you know what I mean by frightening! Animals and therefore also humans are good at copying behaviour of other animals – it’s due to the mirror neurons in our brain which, when you watch someone else doing something, let you feel as if you were doing it yourself.
I myself however tend to get panic attacks if there are too many people around me or if there is a situation involving group dynamics going on. This doesn’t always happen, but only if there is a situation going on that seems to get out of control. Pushing in concerts, escalation in tense situations, chaos, violent outbreaks, everything that is slightly out of control makes me really nervous! I sometimes keep to myself to keep the control and everything that is outside of my control and goes wrong annoys me. I tend to judge people, who spoil my experience of a situation. People who have more power and abuse it make me sick – some teachers would be a good example. I just don’t like not being in control. And there it is again, negative judgement.
To tell you the truth, this is something that I’m working on for a year now. My ex-partner drove me crazy, because he was “out of control”. He was always late for no reason, he was always broke because he didn’t budget, he sometimes had no place to stay and expected me to help him out and the worst of all: he got incredibly drunk for no reason. Having a drink, having a laugh, I don’t mind that, but drunk people scare me. They are out of control, no reasoning possible! There were times when he scared me – even though he was usually a very friendly drunk – and there were times when I was scared that something might happen to him when he’s in some sort of a state. For all this I judged him. I didn’t take him seriously when he said he would do something. I didn’t believe him, when he said that he would be on time. And I didn’t believe him that he cared. The problem was: I couldn’t stop judging him!
After half a year of not being together with him I think I understand what this was all about: In his case, I was simply out of control myself! He made me do stupid things, make stupid decisions, irrational choices and he somehow was a good reason for slacking off. I didn’t like what he brought out in me. He made me a weak girl, who moved to another country because of “some guy” who can’t even sort a room out for himself. I plainly didn’t understand why in fact I didn’t mind him being someone, who after all just didn’t give a damn about things that I took so seriously. He doesn’t care for marks and he doesn’t have to prove anything to himself. He just does his stuff and even if it doesn’t work out, he is fine. Come what may, he seems to know what he’s doing, even if he doesn’t. The problem wasn’t that he was a mess. The problem was that I loved him anyway! The problem was that I felt stupid for being with a guy with so little aspirations for himself.
I myself am so indoctrinated with all these values of success, productivity and achievement that I couldn’t just let him be. Maybe it is even more than that. In fact I thought that I shouldn’t let him be, that I have a responsibility to “save his soul” just to save mine, to stay successful, productive and determined. There was this little voice in my head telling me that after all he’s right. Only society cares about marks, success and achievement and should I really care for this cruel, unfocused group intelligence and its judgement?
What I’m really trying to tell you here is that all these judgements, mine, his, the society’s are completely arbitrary. In fact I ceased to know whose judgement I’m passing, because now I’m actually in the middle of the society that I originally hated so passionately as a teenager. Is it my judgement that my expartner is a lazy unfocused mess? Or is it society’s judgement? Is it my judgement that society is flawed and cruel or is it just hurt feelings? Nobody knows anymore where all this negativity came from in the first place! Who threw the first stone? In the end: who cares where all these harsh judgements came from? It is time to put an end to them. It is time to step back and say “No more”!
The next time you judge someone, be it a beggar, your spouse or your prophet: Stop! Don’t judge, acknowledge! Don’t jump to conclusions, don’t judge according to some sort of criteria, be it positive or negative. You can’t even remember where these values stem from! Who are we to judge? For me this piece of advice is very hard to go through, but I’ve made great progress in the last half a year. I’m still a long way from being someone who takes people as they are. I’m very good at accepting people who are different from society’s standards, but it’s very hard for me to accept what people call “normal behaviour”. Normal is “what is the norm” by definition. The norm is stealing, lying, laziness, abusive behaviour, sex tourism, drugs, spam, materialistic values and … judgemental, you see? Who am I to judge society?
I can only offer my help to whoever is in need.
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