Dostoevsky's Idea: Stop Judging, Achieve Greatness
In "The Brothers Karamazov", Dostoevsky wrote:
Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal, the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty of all for the crime of the one standing before him. When he understands this, then he will be able to be a judge. However mad that may seem, it is true. For if I were righteous, perhaps there would be no criminal standing before me now. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal who stands before you and whom you are judging in your heart, do so at once, and suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach.
Dostoevsky's character is saying something pretty powerful here: that by freeing your mind of judgment, you can create a better world. But how does a mind free of judgment lead to a better world?
How does a mind free of judgment lead to a better world?
The key to creating a better world is correction: we have to be able to correct our mistakes. And the only way to correct our mistakes is through learning, and only a mind free of judgment is capable of endless learning.
Learning happens in two steps: prediction, and then correction.
First, you predict how to achieve a specific goal in the world. And then if you are wrong, you correct your prediction until your goal is achieved.
So again, there are two steps to learning: prediction, and then correction.
And a mind free of judgment is naturally predictive. It naturally makes and corrects its predictions, or in other words, a mind free of judgment naturally learns. But how do you free your mind from judgment?
How do you free your mind from judgment?
By dropping your desire for certainty. A mind that desires certainty is a mind that quickly falls into delusion because certainty is only possible in delusion.
A certain mind says, it sees itself as perfect and believes it has grasped the truth.
And once a mind believes it has the truth, it stops making predictions and starts making judgments. Because there is no value in making predictions when you believe your knowledge is perfect. And because the judgmental mind believes it is perfect, it is not open to being corrected, so naturally, it falls into delusion, and delusion leads to suffering. So how do you drop the desire for certainty?
How do you drop the desire for certainty?
It happens naturally when you see that certainty is impossible. How do you know the sun will come up tomorrow? You do not until it already happens. We can be certain of things that have happened in the past, but the future always lies in uncertainty. There is no reason that tomorrow has to be similar to today.
The idea that the future has to resemble the past is an act of faith, and once you really internalize that, you will probably lose the desire for certainty: because it is a pointless chase.
And once you drop the desire for certainty, you will free your mind of judgment, and once you free your mind of judgment, you will open yourself up to endless learning, and you open yourself up to endless learning, you will be able to correct your errors, and once you can correct your errors, you will create a better world. Now let's take a look at the difference between a mind trapped by judgment and a mind free of judgment.
The difference between a mind trapped by judgment and a mind free of judgment.
Candace is a literary agent, and one day, a writer named Thomas comes into her office. Thomas is very eccentric and doesn't fit the image Candace has in her mind of a successful writer. And since Candace has a judgmental mind, she immediately writes him off. She is not even interested in testing her knowledge. I know what good writers look and act like, she thinks. And he is not one of them. So Thomas takes his novel to a different agent: Lucy.
Lucy sees him and thinks, /well, he certainly does not look like or act like the most successful authors that come in here. But hey, that's just my prediction. I could be wrong.
Let me read his work and find out. So Lucy reads his work and believes that it is a masterpiece. She realizes her original prediction was wrong and corrects it. She signs Thomas, whose book goes on to become a once-in-a-lifetime classical “selling over 500 million copies".
And between these two examples, we see the difference between a judgmental mind and a predictive one. The predictive mind doubts its knowledge, and this doubt leads to testing, testing leads to error, error leads to correction, and correction leads to greatness.
But the judgmental mind is certain of its knowledge, and certainty leads to delusion, and delusion leads to suffering. So if you see the lie behind certainty, you will drop your desire for it. You will be OK with living in uncertainty. And if you drop the desire for certainty, you will free yourself of judgment.
And if you free yourself of judgment, if you stop letting others judge you, if you stop judging yourself and others, you will enter a space of endless learning. And through endless learning, you can correct your errors, and by correcting your errors, you can create a better world.
Conclusion
That concludes my exploration of Dostoevsky's teaching in The Brothers Karamazov. As always, this is just my opinion and understanding of Dostoevsky's teaching, not advice.
