Why do we make decisions and judgements in the first place?

We are mobile, intentional organisms, so we are naturally, constantly forming sense impressions of the world and then sorting and ordering them, in order to navigate our environment. Plants don’t have to do this, because they don’t intentionally move, so they don’t need a central nervous system. They simply expand out, to fill their situation and scatter as many seeds as possible, to further grow.

In order to grow, we have to learn from previous experiences, through cognition and reflection. This then gets passed down through generations, so we tend to view the knowledge of our predecessors as beyond our need to question, especially as it is most broadly distributed among those around us, as group knowledge.

Now it is obvious how this will tend to harden into superstition and ideology, yet how do we remain both open minded and informed, in this complex environment?

There is an essential fallacy currently built into our decision making process. Call it the long shadow of God. Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.

Yet no culture could function, if it simply reveled in sentience and the desires compelling it. We have to make decisions in order to function. Life is this tension between the head and the heart. The anarchy of desire, versus the tyranny of judgement. We can’t take both paths at every fork in the road. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can’t have our cake and eat it too.

So we are part of nature’s process of selection. Consequently culture settled onto this top down father figure lawgiver, as the supreme ideal.

Though the ideal is not the absolute. Judgement can only guide our desires, not create them. It is this will to live, passing through the generations, that is the essence of life. Not any particular forms it expresses. The appetite that gives the banquet of life meaning. The fact of desire, moreso than the objects of desire.

In this confusion, we have come to regard good and bad as some form of cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, yet the reality is they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. Even bacteria sense this attraction/repulsion. It is from this basic binary that all the higher order, evolved social traits and emotional nuances emerge. Respect, responsibility, honor, trust, humility, empathy, sympathy, etc. As well as the negative ones; hate, envy, jealousy, etc.

Yet as we assume good and bad are the ideal, conflicts tend to become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, black versus white. Then any effort to delve into the nuances of a situation and examine all the actual factors leading up to the impasse are regarded as weakness, or even siding with the enemy. Rather than each side being able to assume the other will uphold the cultural standards and take the high road and consequently doing the same and trying to sort through to the better solution. Given the fact that break down of these standards only tends to benefit those around to pick up the pieces, after serious conflicts are finished and both sides are exhausted.

So that is my semi-short observation on the nature and issues of judgement and decision making and why we should be extremely nuanced and judicious in our use of it, not painting everything with the broadest brush possible.