This whole business about not judging people is nonsense. “I try not to judge” or “How dare you judge me!” are two of the most ridiculous statements that people say.
We all judge.
If we didn’t judge, we would embrace everyone exactly as the are and have an utterly random collection of friends, regardless of their personal values, interests, record of incarceration, personal hygiene, propensity to kick kittens, or ability to carry on a conversation without spitting.
We choose our friends carefully, and we do so by judging.
We do this all the time.
You’re in a grocery store, rolling your cart to the cashiers. There are two cashiers ready to scan your groceries and accept payment. One of them is bright eyed and smiling. She looks ready to help. The other looks like a depressed troglodyte who wants to jump off a bridge but can’t find a bridge high enough to do the job.
Who do you choose?
We spend our lives judging people, and it’s okay. We are not obligated to be kind or friendly or even polite to every person in the world.
Some people are rotten. Depressing. Disgusting. Chauvinistic. Smelly. Racist. Negative. Passive aggressive. Stupid. We are not required to spend time with people who we don’t like, and we avoid doing so by judging what we can see and hear and drawing conclusions based upon our observations.
So rather than advising people not to judge or admonishing them if they do, how about asking people to simply judge fairly.
Don’t discount someone based upon a first impression. Don’t assume that all obese people are lazy or all conservatives are uncaring or all old people are boring. Don’t assume that the length of a woman’s skirt or the number of tattoos on a man’s arm says everything (or anything) about them.
Judge fairly, with an open mind and an open heart. And if in doing so you discover that the person is a Red Sox loving, close-talking, inarticulate, racist heathen, by all means shun that person. Extricate yourself from their sphere of influence. Avoid them at all costs.
Just be fair. Make your judgments with as much information as you can gather. And don’t publicize any negative opinions unless absolutely necessary.
And stop telling people to stop judging. It’s ridiculous.
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No, what is really needed is for people to spend the time they spend judging other people trying to turn that same critical eye in on themselves.
I would also strongly suggest that you read "The Fall" by Albert Camus.
Can’t they do both?
Because I still want to curate my friendship roster.
Well, in order to judge fairly, they MUST judge others as they judge themselves. It’s difficult, though. People are not good at evaluating their own actions in the same way that they evaluate others. The information we use to consider our own actions is very different than the information we have about others actions. When I judge my own actions, I know my own intents and I see the results from a perspective looking out from those intents. That is, we don’t see what we look like to others. But when judging other people, all we see is that outward appearance.