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  JUDGING THE MISTAKE VERSUS THE RESPONSE

  If you’re similar to most people, you judge others by whatever mistakes you believe they have made. I was the same way for much of my life. But I eventually realized it was a form of loserthink. A smarter way of thinking is to judge people by how they respond to their mistakes.

  I’m sure that’s the standard you would like applied to your own bad choices in life. We all make mistakes, and I consider that a permanent feature of being human. But how we handle ourselves once the mistakes occur is a better standard for judging each other.

  One big problem with judging people by their mistakes is that what you are actually doing is judging people by the mistakes you are aware of. The people you have judged to be angels might simply be better, or luckier, at getting away with their transgressions against humanity. That would result in an inaccurate ranking of human beings on your personal judgment scale. There’s no point in being a judgmental person if you can’t accurately rank people. That’s just guessing.

  Another problem with judging people by their mistakes is that we make mistakes too, and we always have “reasons” for ours. Sometimes we think you haven’t seen the full picture. Sometimes we are tired, dumb, frightened, angry, or otherwise off our games when we make decisions, and those moments do not represent the person we are most of the time. Sometimes we think our mistakes were not mistakes at all, even if it looks that way to others. Sometimes we are blamed for things we didn’t do. Sometimes we have different priorities, so perhaps the thing you thought was a mistake was the thing I thought was in the interest of the greater good. And so on. The point is that civilization works best when the standard of acceptable behavior that you want applied to you is the same one you apply to others. You could call that a subset of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

  We humans are judgmental people, and we can’t turn off that feature of our brains. Nor would we want to do so, since judging our environment is what keeps us alive. Consciousness is a continuous loop of looking for patterns and problems and judging them so we know what to do next. You can’t turn off your judging any more than a planet can turn off its own gravity. But what you can do is make a decision to judge people’s lesser transgressions by how they respond to their mistakes, as opposed to judging the mistakes. I find that approach to be the most useful way of judging people. If you try it for a year, you’ll have a hard time going back to the old hypocritical way of judging people by their mistakes—a standard you would not like applied to you.

  Just to be clear, society at large has to judge people’s mistakes in the context of the legal system. You can’t forgive a crime in a legal sense, or else society would come apart. And when choosing employees, friends, or lovers, it is entirely sensible to assume that whatever patterns you’ve observed in people’s past actions are more likely to continue than to suddenly stop. I don’t propose ignoring clear patterns of behavior.

  What I do recommend is that we judge the character of others by how they respond to their mistakes, whenever that is practical. And the best response a person can make to a mistake follows this pattern:

  Fully acknowledge the mistake and its impact.

  Display genuine-looking remorse.

  Explain what you plan to do to make amends.

  Explain how you plan to avoid similar mistakes.

  If you do those four things, I’m likely to come away from the experience thinking you are better than most people I’ve encountered despite your original mistake. That is a productive way of thinking for both the judger and the judgee, in the sense that society works better if we embrace that standard.

  Most of the people in my part of the world have been informed by their religions to hate the sin but not the sinner. But that is hard to do because it is so counter to the way our brains are wired that we prefer outsourcing the task of forgiving to a deity. My proposed standard of judging people by how they respond to their mistakes allows you to keep your god out of it and still get a good outcome.

  Judging people by their response to mistakes, as opposed to the mistakes alone, will allow you to feel better about your own mistakes, as long as your response follows the four steps. We humans like to have clear rules of behavior, and the four steps are clear. Follow the steps and you can feel better about yourself and better about others. It will make the world a kinder and less confusing place.

  THE FORTY-EIGHT-HOUR RULE AND THE TWENTY-YEAR RULE

  Have you ever wondered where the rules of etiquette come from? I mean, who was the first person to suggest saying “Bless you” to sneezers? Who decided that holding the elevator door is polite whereas pretending you don’t see someone running toward the elevator while you repeatedly pound the Close button is not polite?

  Someone has to invent new rules of etiquette every now and then to keep up with the changing times. I have invented two new rules that I recommend adopting because doing so will make the world a better place. On top of that, these new rules allow you to avoid loserthink.

  The Forty-Eight-Hour Rule

  The Forty-Eight-Hour Rule says that everyone deserves forty-eight hours to clarify, apologize for, or otherwise update an offending statement. The clock starts when the offender first realizes people are taking offense.

  Until the two-day period has passed, my proposed rule of etiquette is that observers can state how it makes them feel and can politely ask for a clarification. But it is impolite to assume you correctly interpreted an offending statement. Once the clarification/apology/update is offered, you are free under this standard to express your opinion of it.

  If you don’t immediately see the value of the Forty-Eight-Hour Rule, you probably don’t follow the news. About half of all news coverage involves taking people out of context, acting offended, and creating hours of content out of nothing but sarcasm.

  As a public figure, I have often wished the Forty-Eight-Hour Rule existed. Strangers attack me on social media several times a day for things they only imagine I think, said, or did. Rarely do my critics actually disagree with me, which I know sounds strange to those of you who live your lives in private. But after directly observing literally thousands of criticisms of my public opinions on a range of topics over the years, I can tell you that no more than 10 percent of those criticisms involve an accurate interpretation of my opinions or the context in which they were made.

  When you feel offended by someone else’s statement, make it a habit to wait forty-eight hours. You’ll be surprised how often you’ve misinterpreted the message. And that’s not a coincidence. While it is somewhat rare for people to intentionally say outrageously offensive things in public, it is extraordinarily common for people to be misinterpreted. The Forty-Eight-Hour Rule gives people the benefit of the doubt consistent with the odds.

  It is loserthink to imagine you can accurately discern the intentions of public strangers. It is better to ask people to clarify their opinions and accept that as the best evidence of their inner thoughts.

  As a practical matter, the only way we can navigate life is by continuously making assumptions about the intentions of others. I’m not suggesting you can turn off that instinct. But the most productive—and reasonable—way to respond to an offensive statement is to wait for the clarification or apology. And that is because most offensive statements are not what they seem at first glance. Once you have better context and more reliable facts, you’re on more solid ground to act as if you understand the offender’s point and intention. And even then, you’re often wrong. But at least you can say you tried to be open-minded. We don’t live in a society where people can be open-minded as much as we might like. But it makes the world a better place if we are conspicuously trying.

  In 2018, Roseanne Barr posted a career-crippling tweet that was widely criticized for sounding racist. She tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett looked like what you would get if the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby. That’s a funny line if you have seen Valerie Jarrett’s haircut, and you know the character played by white actress Helena Bonham Carter in Planet of the Apes, and—this is the crucial part—you are unaware that Jarrett is part African-American. Roseanne claimed she was unaware of that fact. Personally, I wouldn’t have guessed it either, based on Jarrett’s looks.

  When critics tore into Roseanne for her alleged racist tweet, she immediately denied it had racist intent. I found her denial credible: what public figure would intentionally compare an African-American to an ape, in public, and think it would all work out? Even an actual racist wouldn’t do something that dumb, assuming they also starred in a hit television show. To me, it isn’t a credible accusation that Roseanne’s tweet had a racist intent.

  When analyzing this sort of situation, I have the advantage of having “famous-person perspective.” I’ve experienced one publication after another accusing me of all sorts of heinous intentions I know to be false while readers assume they are true. Nonfamous people know that sometimes the press distorts what famous people say. But they generally don’t know how common it is.

  Adding to the credibility of my interpretation of Roseanne’s intentions is that she clarified she didn’t mean it as a race comment, and she appeared to be consistently and emotionally horrified that anyone would interpret it that way.

  Still, I’m no mind reader. I could be wrong. I have been wrong before. But what I can say with 100 percent certainty is that Roseanne’s critics are not mind readers either. We’re all looking at the clues and making assumptions about her inner thoughts.

  The Roseanne situation is what caused me to suggest the Forty-Eight-Hour Rule for public clarifications. The rule, if followed, would allow anyone to clarify a statement that has been interpreted negatively. Once the clarification is given, I think the press and the public should accept the clarification.

  But wait, you say—what if the clarification is nothing but an ass-covering lie?

  The Forty-Eight-Hour Rule suggests you should accept the lie as if it were the truth, then move on. That’s how a lot of social interactions work. We call it “manners.”

  YOUR FRIEND: Sorry I’m so late. Traffic was terrible!

  YOU (THINKING): That’s probably a lie.

  YOU (TALKING): Glad you got here safely! Let me buy you a drink.

  We can’t be the thought police. It isn’t a practical way to run a society. But it is both practical and useful to insist that people do and say the right things. If you have evil thoughts, but consistently do and say things that are good for the world, you’re a good person in my book.

  Shorter version: You are what you do, not what you think.

  Likewise, if you harbor some bigoted thoughts, but you have managed to use your sense of reason to override them and act in ways society approves, I’m good with you too. I won’t judge you by your thoughts. But I will certainly let you know if your actions (including your words) work against the greater good.

  Part of my thinking on this topic is influenced by the fact that people evolve to become whatever they say they are. If a bigot says in public often enough that racism is evil, the bigot is self-influencing himself to be less racist. We are better off encouraging insincere but positive opinions, because they are self-fulfilling to a degree. Reward what works. If you are getting the right actions, something is working, and it puts people on the path of faking it until it becomes real. I’ll take that situation over guessing what people are thinking and condemning them for it. We can’t have a successful culture based on condemning people for presumed thoughts.

  When you see someone clarify an “unbelievable” story into something totally ordinary, you can usually trust that the ordinary version is the correct one. I won’t claim this works every time, but it is rarely a good idea to believe the unbelievable when the alternative is to believe the ordinary.

  When you see an “unbelievable” story in the press that is based on interpreting someone else’s meaning, it is generally fake news. Wait for the clarification to see if there is a perfectly ordinary explanation.

  The Twenty-Year Rule

  Let’s stop blaming each other for things that happened more than twenty years ago. Humans change a lot in two decades. If we are lucky enough to mature and learn over time, we become better versions of our younger selves—wiser, less selfish, and more useful.

  In olden times—let’s say, before the Internet—your mistakes of youth would go unrecorded. The Twenty-Year Rule applied by default in most cases, because no one had an efficient way to check up on your behavior that far back.

  Now we have social media that creates a total slideshow of every dumbass thing you ever thought or did in your entire life. It turns out that most of us were worse people when we were younger. You wouldn’t want to know the teenage me. But I’d like to think I’ve improved since then. I’ll agree to judge you by your most recent twenty years on this planet if you will extend me the same courtesy.

  I realize this isn’t a perfect system. Some of us have done things in our past so awful that no time can forgive. But the alternative is worse. If you can judge me today by what I did fifty years ago, I can do the same with you. That way leads to darkness.

  If social media didn’t exist, the Twenty-Year Rule would be less urgent. But we are perilously close to judging each other by our worst decisions in high school. That’s no way to organize society.

  It is loserthink to judge people by their much younger selves. People change. And they usually improve.

  CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND HOW TO KNOW YOU FELL FOR ONE

  If you are engaged in discussing politics, you have probably accused others of falling for conspiracy theories. There’s a good chance others have accused you of the same thing. So how can you figure out who is in the mental prison and who is the wise observer from the outside? I’ll give you some tips on doing just that.

  There Are No Experts on Your Side

  It is fairly common for experts to disagree on big issues, even when 95 percent are on one side. It is far less common for 100 percent of the experts to be on the same side while the other side is comprised entirely of non-experts. For example, there are no trained astronomers who believe the earth is flat. If you are unable to find one credible expert working in the right field to agree with you, maybe it’s time to rethink your belief.

  Invisible Elephant in the Room

  Hallucinations generally involve adding imaginary things to the environment. For example, if you think you see ghosts, UFOs, or Bigfoot, you are imagining them added to the existing scenery. What you rarely or never see is a hallucination that subtracts something from the existing reality. For example, you never hear of people hallucinating that the furniture in their homes is missing when it is actually still there right in front of their eyes. So if you and other people are looking at the same evidence in the same place at the same time, and you can clearly see something the rest do not see, the problem is probably on your end. Here I am not talking about interpretations of data. I’m talking about seeing something as clearly as the hand in front of your face. If you see it, and others cannot, bet on the people who don’t see it, because hallucinations are usually additions to reality, not subtractions.

  HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE IN A CULT

  If you are a member of a cult, your leader is probably telling you crazy things and expecting you to believe them. For example, if your leader is telling you to kill yourself so you can free your soul to live for eternity beneath a couch cushion, you might want to skip the next meeting. But simply knowing that cults peddle falsehoods won’t help you determine if you are in a cult, because the press, politicians, spiritual leaders (except yours, of course), and special-interest groups are brainwashing the public with falsehoods all the time. Your favorite news source is almost certainly doing as much brainwashing as informing, but you probably think that sort of thing only happens to the sad bastards who make the mistake of consuming the wrong news sources.

  No one is exempt from society’s powerful brainwashing forces. The press is telling its viewers what they want to hear—one version of reality for the political right and one version for the left—and it looks exactly like truth to the respective audiences. If you’re human, confirmation bias and what you believe to be your “common sense” are identical in how they make you feel. That’s why I often say you can’t look at the past, or even the present, to know the truth about your reality, because it is easy to fit different theories to the same set of observations.

  If you want to test the validity of your worldview, it isn’t good enough that the facts in evidence are consistent with your theory of events. Multiple theories can meet that standard. The only practical way to test your worldview is to see how well it predicts. If you belong to a group whose interpretation of reality does a good job of explaining the past (or so it seems) yet is bad at predicting the near future, you are probably in a cult, or something that acts like one.