The Prejudiced Man

The Prejudiced Man

How well do you think you can detect a lie?  How well do you think you can read people?  If you think you are good, beware!

In very early stages of our lives we found out that other people didn’t think the same like us, and we wondered what were in those brains attached to other bodies.  And on those occasions when we were teased and tricked by another kid we learned to our dismay that we never knew what’s in the other kid’s mind.  Then we lived with that.  We slowly picked up those subtle clues about the emotion and the true intention of somebody else.  When she had that look, she was happy, upset, angry, sympathetic, jealous, indifferent, contemptuous, or… deceitful.  We also learned how to read between the lines, how to decipher body languages, and what were the ‘tells’ when somebody didn’t speak the truth.

And then we have some success.  “I always know she’s up to something.  She’s acts dubiously.”  “I’ve told you he admired you.  Now you know what I meant.”  “That guy was lying.  I could tell it in his eyes.” And so on and so on.  It seems like in the blinding mist we have somehow found our bearing, and the most remarkable is, we’ve found it by ourselves, our wit, our experience, our wisdom.

And that, is a huge bias, my friend.  We all want to be in control, at least in our own lives.  It would drive us nuts if everything were unpredictable like a dice roll.  That’s why fortune telling is one of our oldest businesses, along with prostitution, and it never faded away.  We want to be in the know, in a world vastly governed by randomness.  People are largely unpredictable, sometimes even by themselves.  It’s really comforting now that we can read them somehow.  The success we had in this respect brings us too much satisfaction that it blinded us from our equally frequent failures.  We ignored those times we misread people, unless we paid big prices for our failures.  If we are unpunished, we forget. 

Yes, our selective memory works this way.  We’re getting better and better, reflecting on the successful reads, while cheerfully ignoring misreads.  Soon we became over-confident.  Arrogance slipped in.  I am the complex and subtle being in this world, and you are skin-deep, nothing more than your facial expression or words suggest.  If you don’t understand me, you are stupid, or I am complex.  If I don’t understand you, you are stupid, or too complicated. It’s something like the “if I win, I’m good; if I lose, I’m unlucky” mentality.  That’s prejudice.

Ironically, our justice system relies on this same prejudice.  Judges think they can read people.  They say they can tell somebody’s lying by his demeanor.  They say an alleged victim is credible because she wept genuinely at the witness stand.  Judges and juries are seen as some effective lie detectors.  Truth is, people behave very differently when facing the same situation.  Some may be always uneasy speaking out, and that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s lying.  Some may be exceptionally calm when being framed up, and that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.  One of the most respectable judges in the territory once said, “I accept her evidence because if she was acting, she would have been a phenomenal actress.”  It looks like there was one judge who knew the game of justice and his own limits, and more remarkably, he was willing to speak it out. 

Judges are professional liars in a way.  They pretend that they can read people. But they have to.  At the end of the day they will be the ones saying “guilty” or “not guilty”, and they can’t vote “abstention”.  It’s not their fault.  They also have to make a living, and all the society can best have is some justice.  Complete justice is naivety.  We can’t complain.

However, as a common man, outside the court of law, I implore you this. Don’t be a goddamned judge.  Try not to judge people that readily.  We are getting better with time, but not quite as good as we think we are.  Wrong judgments cost us, dearly sometimes.  Stay foolish.  For the moment we think we are wise, foolishness begins.