https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xABci4u9dIc
So one of the topics I’ve covered in my live streams in sort of long form, if you will, because my live streams are long. Although they always start with a monologue, you can skip there. Someday we’ll clip out the monologues and put them as individual videos. For now, I haven’t done that. Not really going for like blasting content to people yet, although maybe I should. Who knows? This video is going to be about this format that I’ve been talking about with discernment, judgment, and action. When we’re talking about these three things in that order, and I think that order is important, there’s a reason for it. There are several reasons. But I wanted to cover it here in as concise a fashion as I can because we’ve sort of completed that arc of talking about it and sort of things proximal around it, like boundaries comes before, right? And then after that, we’re doing talks about participation and all these other pieces. But they’re sort of the core elements. And the reason why they’re important is because they’re interrelated so tightly. They’re not the same thing, but they’re interrelated tightly. And the ability to discern what’s going on is really important. You need to discern things like whether or not people are good or bad actors. You need to discern whether or not people are acting out of, we’ll say, a trauma response to something, although I don’t particularly like that framing. It can be useful. And what that means. And the way you do that is by observing actions, discerning the actions, judging the actions for other people. The way you operate is there’s a discernment that happens. You make a judgment and then you take an action. So you see how it reverses on the outside compared to what’s happening, say, on the inside. Because you don’t have access to people’s thoughts. So you can’t know what they’re seeing and not seeing. This is where people get really, really confused. So I’ve had this conversation with lots of people over the past three or four years. They believe that they understand other people’s motivations. And the problem with that is that they’re basing this on the actions that they see and their rationale and their perspective without recognizing other people of different perspectives. So if you run into a situation where you see somebody behaving and then it has a certain outcome, you go, oh, well, they must have done that because they’re a bad person, for example, because it had a bad outcome. When in fact, they didn’t know that outcome would happen. They had no way to know it because they didn’t see it coming and they couldn’t have because they lacked discernment. And so when we don’t understand the difference between other people’s action, judgment and discernment and our discernment, judgment and action, we get very confused. You can’t just reverse them. Your discernment starts from your perspective. Your perspective is most likely unique. How unique? That’s hard to say. So the reason why this is important is because, again, you can tell a lot about a person by what actions they take in the world. Jordan Peterson talks about, well, I don’t believe that you believe what you say. I believe that what you believe is in your actions. That’s what your belief is. It’s what you act on. So it doesn’t matter what you say in some sense. This is the pragmatic approach. Yeah, your words are nice and cute and maybe they’ll match your actions, but I’m going to go with your actions first. And there’s a lot of unconscious things going on. So maybe you’re acting out of trauma or acting out of a perspective that’s limited in a way that you don’t even understand. And so if you act as though politics is the correct way to think about the world, then when your party’s not in power, you’re going to feel oppressed. Fair enough. I don’t think that’s a good way to do it because I don’t think politics is a good frame. I’ve talked about that many times. But you can see the way in which your perspective limits your actions so you can’t just reverse into perspective or into discernment or into what judgment people are making because they don’t necessarily see the consequences that you see. Maybe your perspective is better than theirs or just different. It could be worse, too. Maybe they see something coming and that’s why they didn’t help you. Or that’s why they got away from you when you were doing something because they kind of saw something coming that you didn’t see coming. That happens, too. And one of the things that springs out as a pattern from all of this is there are a lot of people out there who don’t like success. They don’t like success. They don’t like Elon Musk. Or they think, you know, Elon Musk is the way he is because he’s smart or because, right, there’s dozens of reasons. And I’ve been over Elon Musk before. There’s lots of reasons why Elon Musk is successful. And if any one of them were missing, maybe he wouldn’t be so successful. Maybe he would, but maybe not. I don’t know. Worth thinking about, though. Maybe success is not one thing. Maybe success requires 12 things. I don’t know. When people hate success, it’s usually because they feel judged. So let’s suppose, for example, you go to college, get a degree in computer science, right, and then you see somebody with no degree and they’re making a lot more money than you are. That could make you rather upset. And you might be upset at that success because it’s judging you. Maybe you weren’t good when you went to college. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing computer science. Maybe you’re not good at it. Maybe you can’t be good at it. We can’t be good at everything. I suck at drawing. I kind of exemplify that on my videos. Look at my terrible drawing, right? I suck at playing instruments. Could I learn better drawing? I mean, I have in the past, but it’s just too much effort for me to keep it up. Could I learn musical instruments? Probably not. I don’t have that level of discipline for that thing. I have high levels of discipline for other things. Just not that. And we don’t recognize the nuance, right? We don’t discern, oh, this person’s really disciplined in these areas and not in these other areas. We tend to go, oh, they did this one thing really disciplined, so they were a really disciplined person. Really? Is that how persons are? Just everything’s disciplined or everything’s not? That lacks discernment, right? And we have reduced discernment. And so we don’t recognize these things. So how do you know when someone hates success? Well, that’s easy. When you give them a way to succeed, they don’t like it. They get upset. They’re skeptical. Well, that wouldn’t work. That wouldn’t work for me. Well, I can’t really do that. It’s like, really? Why not? And then they don’t have an answer as to why they couldn’t do that, which is mysterious if you think about it. It’s like, well, why wouldn’t… If you can’t do it, why wouldn’t you have an answer to why you can’t do it, right? Why didn’t you try it? Or when you tried it, why did you make that mistake? Why don’t you try it again? Sometimes you just have to try stuff again. That can go too far, but also sometimes you just have to try stuff again. That is part of discernment. Another part of discernment, again, is figuring out when you’re imposing your perspective or your rationality or your values and virtues on somebody else and then presuming their motives. You lack discernment. And judgment’s hard because we judge things. You have to judge to take an action. You’re not taking actions without judging something. And if we deny our judgment, we destroy our discernment because we tell ourselves we’re not discerning. By telling ourselves we’re not judging, of course we’re discerning. And when we pay less attention, that’s not good. When we see these actions in the world, those actions came from a judgment and therefore those actions judge us. It’s inevitable. All actions and inaction judges. And that sucks. Unless you’re okay with being judged, right? Unless you’re actually legitimately trying and you understand that you’re not going to be perfect. And so judgment’s not bad. Judgment gives you boundaries. It shows you what the possible is, right? If somebody can come to this country, not speak this language and become a millionaire in three years, maybe you can too. That’s one way to look at it. Or you can say, oh, I’m worthless and I can’t do anything. Okay, you could look at it that way too. I don’t know, it’s the best way to look at it. But you could. And that’s the question. Like one of them is, what are you looking at? What are you presuming? Why are you negative or positive about something that somebody else is doing? If somebody else is being successful, you should be happy for them. Because success of one person benefits everybody. It doesn’t just benefit that person. We’re stuck on this planet together, in this world together, and we need to cooperate to get along and participate together. And there’s going to be judgments involved. Our own judgment of ourselves, our own judgment of others, right? But also other people’s judgment of us through their actions or through their explicit judgment. And sometimes your judgment is going to be wrong. That’s okay too. It’s unavoidable. So you should get used to it. So I just wanted to cover that. It’s a thought. I can tie those together in a powerful way. Prospective, discernment, judgment, action, right? And how it’s reversed on the outside of you. And when you presume too far or you take your own assumptions as the only possible assumptions, which they’re not, by the way, then you can make lots of mistakes in terms of trying to sense-make the world. And it’s really important, this sense-making. We have to be really careful. Sometimes we need to just believe people’s actions and not listen to their words, right? And sometimes you do that with yourself. I’ve worked this out and I know how to solve poverty. And then you implement it and it doesn’t work. Well, like, take the hint. You know, it doesn’t mean don’t try again. Maybe the implementation was wrong. But maybe you’re just wrong. Maybe your underlying thesis is wrong. That’s more likely. That’s way more likely. And that’s the problem. We don’t have this deep sense that, well, maybe the reason why things didn’t work out the way I thought is because I’m wrong. Occam’s razor. Simplest explanation. The odds that you’re right about something are tiny. Just the way it is. And the less we learn from our actions, from our participation in the world, either with ourselves, with others, or with nature, right? The more problem we have with sense-making, the more problem we have discerning where we end and everything else begins. Where other things end and begin. This is a problem. If you don’t understand that the president of the United States doesn’t control the country because he doesn’t, then you’re going to have a hard time understanding how there was a mask mandate at the federal level that got rescinded. Why would that ever happen? You’re going to have a hard time explaining why prohibition was enacted in the Constitution and then rescinded 10 years later. Not saying there wasn’t a lot of damage done in the meantime. In both cases, there was. And damage is bad. All I’m saying is, if you think that’s the way the world works and you see all these counter examples, you’re living in a form of contradiction. You’ve got this cognitive dissonance. It’s very hard on you. And you probably don’t even realize it. That’s why bad frames are important to realize. Like, oh, I just have a bad frame. Whether it’s a political frame or an economics frame that you’re trying to fit everything into, or even a religious frame. You try to fit things into a small religious frame. That won’t work. That’s usually a cult. Some people call them ideologies. I would argue ideologies are just mini failed religions. And that’s part of discernment. Is knowing when your actions in the world don’t lead to the results that you expect. And therefore you need to change not necessarily your expectation, but your discernment and your judgment. It’s like, oh, maybe I’m stupid about this. Maybe I’m stupid about lots of things. It’s OK. It’s OK. Like, welcome to being a human in the human condition. Not that hard. So that’s why this formula where you have a perspective and then there’s a discernment that happens and that leads to a judgment automatically. Right. And then there’s an action taken. It’s important. And what you see in other people is the reverse. You see the act, the results of their action. You don’t even always see their action. And then you have to infer the rest. But I suggest you don’t do that. Like, it’s too hard. I suggest you look at the action and judge the action at its face value. And then you can meet the person either as somebody who made a mistake or somebody who is doing something deliberate and knowing. Because that’s important, too. It might be rare that people do evil things. And it might be less rare than it was because I can’t imagine it just sort of stays the same over time. But it’s there. And if you never see it, if you never see evil in the world or if you never see evil in yourself, there’s a problem with your discernment. There’s a problem with your judgment. There’ll be problems with your actions in the world. And you need to know that because maybe no one’s explained this to you. Maybe no one’s told you this. Maybe no one’s exemplified this for you to see and know in a more embodied way. So I just wanted to cover all that and thank everybody for watching. I know I have lots of new subscribers still, which is great. And the number is still climbing, which is freaking amazing. And I’m just blown away by that. And hopefully I’ll be monetized soon because now YouTube has done this monetization thing. And I did want to give a shout out. Like, I don’t do this alone. This is not like my work alone. I have an editor. Not always. Occasionally I edit my own videos. You could probably tell because they’re not that great. I have artwork, right? The front artwork that’s done in the videos was done by my friend, Yana. All the banner artwork on the channel is done by Sally Jo, who’s a wonderful artist. I’ve talked about her before. She’s got a wonderful channel, Sally Jo M. Cooper. And I have lots of people that I talk to, like Jesse, not just on the live streams, but also on the Discord server and such. The Mark of Wisdom Discord server. And that helps me to explain these things. And it helps me to know which things to explain because there’s a lot in the zeitgeist. And that’s been coming up a lot lately in particular. And hopefully you’re finding these things valuable. And I hope you’ll comment and let me know good, bad, indifferent. This is another video I kind of did without a script. So hopefully it went as well as the last one I did without a script. Maybe better. You never know. And look, thank you very much for the thing that I value the most, which is your time and attention.