Who is the judge

When people are arrogant, I feel threatened. Their belief in superiority implies my inferiority. Instead of seeing their call for love, I see an attack on my worth. My admonition to people regarding their judgmental outlook is really my defense against being judged unworthy. I am the arbiter of my self-worth, but I project it onto an arrogant person and find him guilty and in need of change for condescending.

My humiliation fantasies are a projection of sadomasochism onto innocent people who I see as dominant oppressors hurting me for their pleasure. I go even further by denying my innocence and seeing myself as worthy of being punished. Therefore I consider my humiliation to be my rightful due and not sadistic abuse. I am not a victim of my oppressor but of my own worthless essence to which I'm eternally bound.

This fantasy is the shadow of my precarious display of intelligence and confidence. I hide my mistakes and weaknesses in fear of tarnishing my perfect facade. It's ironic how much I puff up only to dream of being deflated. 

There is no truth in either of these insane imaginings. The thing that puffs up only to be deflated doesn't exist except as a mirage that witnesses to the suffering of existing separately from and at odds with one another. We in fact are not separate, but we see the world that way because we believe it, and believing is "seeing". To see a different world, I must be willing to let go of my previous worldview. I must be open to the possibility that I have been wrong about how I see. It is easier to admit I have been wrong if I associate my present unease with my present perception. It is easier to form this association if I am present to how I'm actually feeling in the moment. 

Whenever I am frustrated or afraid, I will ask myself, "Would I rather see peace instead of this?" If the answer is yes, I know I must be open to the possibility that I am seeing and believing wrongly about the superiority and inferiority of human beings. 

Practical Solipsism

Whereas the philosophy that all we can know is what is in our own minds is often ridiculed as being impractical because it denies the objective existence of others, there is practical value in noting that our values and judgments are indeed subjective and thus changeable.

Our minds hold a pattern, which ostensibly corresponds to an "external" reality. It is a map of a territory that we can never sense directly because sensing necessarily filters information. If we had a direct, unfiltered experience of so-called external reality, we would receive one huge chunk of information, unorganized and unmanageable. It would be like downloading the entire content of the Internet as one large stream of ones and zeroes without a method of decoding it.

Objectivity is consensus and relative repeatability mistaken as fragments of absolute truth. The illusion of absoluteness leads us to a problem in judgment of right and wrong in human intentions and behaviors. When we think, "He should have done this," or, "She shouldn't be this way," there often arises an uneasy feeling of annoyance, rejection, or distaste. We automatically blame the other person for causing this disturbance when it really is our mind's signal that we are encountering a contradiction in our mental map of the world. Before we can even consider that our map needs correcting, we must be open to the possibility that our judgments are not absolute.

The feeling of judgment signals a contradiction between what we expect the other person to do and what we observe them doing. Ironically, it's easier to assume that our expectation is more correct than observed reality. This is simply a habit, a repeated pattern of thinking that has served us in the past. We ignore the fact that it does not serve us now out of sheer laziness: it requires thoughtful effort to adjust our mental map of how the other person should act. We would need to ask ourselves why it is the most beneficial course of action in their minds and hearts to do what they just did that annoyed us so.

What can we control?

A practical solipsist does not deny that his values and actions affect the conditions of his experiences even if he denies the metaphysical independence of such conditions. The practical question then is, "What can I control to achieve happiness or less disturbance?" In the case of judging people, the answer is to elaborate upon or otherwise change your model of how the other person should be. In other words, justify their behavior with adjusted "laws of the universe" (mental model). The alternative is to resist your observed reality, a tiring and futile endeavor.

As a bonus, when you understand more deeply and more consistently with your observations why a person values or acts a certain way, you can more easily organize causes and conditions for them to act in a way that is mutually beneficial. You can spend your energy where it actually matters instead of just frustratingly grinding on why they are the way they are.