Posted in History & Literature

Judging History

When we look back on history, there are countless stories where we wonder: “what were people thinking?”. Time after time, people have banded together to inflict unspeakable horrors on other groups of people. Consider the burning of “witches” in Salem, the mass guillotine executions following the French revolution, the transatlantic slave trade, the Rwandan genocide, the infamous Unit 731 of Imperial Japan that performed inhumane experiments on countless innocent people…

Even now, there is no shortage of examples of how a governing entity chosen by its people punishes a subset of its own population. We see homosexual people imprisoned and tortured in Russia. We see refugee children being torn apart from their parents at border control in the USA. We see brutal state policing of ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs in China.

It is very easy for us to examine these stories with a judgemental microscope. How can these governments be so evil? How can the people be so foolish to elect this government? Why are people not rising up against these powers to restore justice? The problem is that it is far easier to judge people for their actions rather than their intentions, or the context and setting that triggered them. Let us take an infamous historical atrocity as an example: the Holocaust.

Although Nazi Germany was initially formed from a coup d’état, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party maintained overwhelming support from the German people throughout its brutal regime. We may wonder how such a large group of well-educated, culturally sophisticated and civilised people could be swayed to support the inhumane actions committed by the Nazi government, but if you look at the historical context, we can find some explanations.

After World War 1, Germany was in economic ruin due to the “total war” nature of WW1 using up resources, followed by the staggering reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles, with the final kick of the Great Depression. Inflation and unemployment ran rampant, leaving the populace hopeless and in despair.

But when Hitler rose to power, promising food, land and order, along with hopes of making Germany “great” again, those who had been sick and tired of their depressing situation rallied under the Nazi cause. The Nazi party capitalised on this desperation and vulnerability, using Jewish people and other minority groups as a scapegoat, blaming them as the cause of Germany’s downfall after the Weimar Republic. This allowed them to commit atrocities such as the internment and execution of millions of people, along with unprovoked war against the rest of Europe, by promising the people that it would provide more jobs, more goods and a better world for the Germans.

We can see from this case that a large part of how such a terrible situation arose was due to the desperation that people felt due to the context of global economic depression and the outcome of the Great War. If we simply judged the people for being “sheeple”, blindly following Hitler’s charismatic leadership and propaganda, then we would learn nothing out of this case study.

However, if we examine the underlying reasons for how this situation arose, we can see that the same horrors could happen again in our lifetime under similar contexts. This approach allows us to see current affairs from more objective stances and hopefully explore solutions, rather than just putting the blame on the people affected by their political, economic and historical environment. Furthermore, this frame of thinking helps us be less swayed by forces that are out of our control, as it lets us use our rational and logical thinking to make decisions, rather than our emotional reactions and survival instincts.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Bad Hair Day

Have you ever had a day (or in some people’s cases, their whole life) where you cannot help but think that everyone is judging you because your hair just does not look right? Almost everyone has at least one “bad hair day”, when they feel self-conscious about their appearance and how others in society perceive them. Depending on the person’s general confidence level and self-esteem, the effect of a bad hair day can range from being harmless to completely ruining someone’s mood.

A psychologist named Professor Marianne LaFrance at Yale University decided to study how physical appearance affects people’s feelings. She separated 120 volunteers into three groups. Group 1 was asked to recall a bad hair day, group 2 was told nothing (control group) and group 3 was asked to recall a day in which they had difficulty opening a package (bad experience unrelated to appearance). She then measured the change in mood among the participants to see how the memory of a bad hair day could affect mood and self-esteem. To no surprise, the results showed that those who recalled a bad hair day suffered from much lower self-esteem and mood. Group 1 felt less smart and confident compared to the other groups and felt “embarrassed” in general.

The reason for the drop in self-esteem is that we are socially educated to feel that we are judged on our appearance. We have an inherent belief that an untidy appearance will mean that others will judge us as being unorganised, unprofessional and not trustworthy. This applies to anything that might potentially affect our image, such as an embarrassing moment or an unsightly accident. We become fixated on this idea and shine a “social spotlight” on ourselves, thinking that any embarrassing moment for us will be instantly judged by those around us. In psychology, this is known as the spotlight effect and it can be quite a powerful effect.

But here is the kicker: nobody cares. We have a psychological tendency to overreact to such situations where a spotlight might be turned on us, when in truth, others do not notice it as much as we think they do. There have been many experiments (mostly involving university students) where surveys showed that fellow students barely paid attention to or had little recollection of another student’s embarrassing moments or dishevelled appearances. Although it may have been the most embarrassing moment in the person’s life, to other people, it is at best a comedic happening that fades away in their memories.

So the next time you feel that others are judging you and you feel the blinding spotlight on you, just remember: the greatest, and only important judge of your character, is yourself.

Posted in Life & Happiness

Yellow Ball

If I was to put a yellow ball in front of you and ask what colour the ball is, you would confidently say “yellow”. As you say, the ball appears yellow, but the answer is technically wrong. Strictly speaking, the ball itself is not yellow – it is merely reflecting the colour yellow. The ball only appears yellow because we see the yellow part of the natural light spectrum bouncing off the ball. We cannot say that the essence of the ball is “yellow”. For example, if you were to look at the ball through a red lens, the yellow light would be filtered and you would see a black ball. A person with a certain kind of colour blindness would say the ball has a bluish hue. A butterfly, which sees the ultraviolet spectrum as well, would see a colour we cannot even name.

Human beings judge objects using the vision. We describe an object as we see it and store that information in our brain to define the object. For this purpose, the fact that a colour blind person or a butterfly sees the ball a different colour is irrelevant to us. All we need to know is that object appears yellow to us. But this is only the case for objects. Let us imagine the ball is a person. If everyone in the world sees you as a yellow ball, would that make you a yellow ball? Of course not. However, people worry too much about how others see them. Although other people’s perception does not change our true nature in the slightest, we even go as far as erasing or abandoning our nature to look good in front of another person. Thus, whether our essence is white, black, red, blue or technicolour, when others see us as yellow, we have a tendency to try desperately to become yellow. 

If the world says you are a yellow ball, act crazy and be a red ball. There is not a single reason you should have to hide your true nature. Have confidence in your essence. There is nothing wrong with that.

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