The Establishment

Or the importance of it.

How many times have I wondered what'll happen if judgementalism was totally dispensed with....
What would we see around us if no one belonged to any of the classifications we've all been taught to make? How much time would we save if we didn't try to fit every person into a box whose dimensions have been mostly handed down to us? What is the necessity to see people as this or that? Why not see them as quantized units of XYZ, where xyz is MY yardstick? Now, I don't want everything under the sun to be described w.r.t its relationship to me ( to partly quote Dogbert). I too am as much a part of this game as the next blade of grass is, and even if I have my own yardstick, I still have to guage prudently.

Firstly, there'll be as many yardsticks are there are heads. ( 2 for Siamese twins). And all those yardsticks will further be subjected to judgement on count of how accurately each one defines people. This Big Yardstick that judges the smaller ones, is nothing but our daily life. Our deeds, their effects, their timeliness et al, and how those affect the quality of life we lead, on levels that matter to us - that's the only proof we each have, to see if our judgements have been accurate. This is the only true reflection of whether our perception and consequent judgements ( our respective yardsticks) have been accurate or not. The establishment known as human civilization, chronicles every second of existence, but largely in the form of things done, or not done. The human spirit by itself, has to be communicated to the external world, through actions. No one would know what a beautiful mind Einstein had, if he hadn't taken the trouble to get his work published. It is ultimately what you do that counts, even if what you think is great. Since perception of man is largely limited to the inputs the 5 senses give the mind, one has to bring out visible results before one becomes accepted and revered, or castigated and ostacrised. Till such a stage where man becomes receptive to inputs from sources other than his 5 senses, we'll all have to "show" our spirit through work, words, art, music, and other ways that are percievable.

The Establishment ( read : world as percieved by the 5 senses) is one's only method of giving meaning to the beauty in one's mind. The most beautiful ideas a potter has are of little use unless he dirties his hands to give shape to them. In his daily life. So to that extent, the Establishment is important, and to that extent, judgemental skills are important. His individual yardstick and how he measures the worth of his creativity (or anything else) is of no importance to anyone, unless they can see that. It's all about the utility quotient. We all have to "establish" our spirit's "worth", because the most common yardstick that societies have, is that of usefulness.

But having individual scales of measurements, or individual yardsticks, still only means that we now slot people into boxes that we've ourselves determined the dimensions of. The dimensions haven't been handed down to us. But we're still judging.

Why DO we make judgements about things at all? Ok, looks like a basic need, because to dig a flower bed, you first gotta call a spade, a spade. No work will ever get done if there wasn't constant judgement, decision making, error control, feedback going on.


When we make judgements, we're just technically classifying. When we make decisions based on these judgements, we need to think with more than just the rational mind. When most of our decisions are based almost entirely on the rational judgements we make, then we fail to take into account our own active thinking ( influenced and limited only by the principles we've built into our lives). Active thinking forms a part of other factors that influence decisions ( other factors like intuitive judgement - again, not pre-conditioned intuition, but a more genuine element of our being).
So most decisions we take ( which define the way we live our lives ) do not always depend on rational slotting/classification.

But then how many of us have drawn the line between making judgements and living by them?


We forget that not all flowers grew on the same soil, not all of them need the same kind of manure, and not all of them got the kinda manure they needed. We don't even know what colour they were supposed to be, because who knows what colours their dad and mom each had? Who knows which wind carried what kind of pollen grain and dumped it on what?

If it was inanimate objects like spades and shovels, anyone's sense of judgement would work, since there's no complex thinking that the spade does. As long as it subscribes to a broadly defined shape and size, it'll work as a spade. When it comes to people, the same sense of judgement doesn't quite work. You can look at a pink flower and say this one was born out of a white and red combination. Botanists and Genetic Engineers can only tell you that these genes are dominant and those genes are recessive. And after extensive research, spanning several generations back, they MIGHT be able to tell you why such traits became dominant/recessive. But lets face facts. The recursion never ends.

Or you can accept the fact that the the flower's pink, and enjoy that colour for a second and move on.

Alternately,if you find beauty in the fact that such brilliant combinations of genes exist in a flower, then its colour isn't as beautiful to you as the intricacies are.

It's a sense of beauty that we all seek. Not just the colour, not just the technical intricacies.