In /The Brothers Karamazov/, Dostoevsky wrote, “Remember especially that you cannot be
the judge of anyone.
For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too,
is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps
most guilty of all for the crime of the one standing before him.
When he understands this, then he will be able to be a judge.
However mad that may seem, it is true.
For if I myself were righteous, perhaps there would be no criminal standing before me now.
If you are able to take upon yourself the crime of the criminal who stands before you
and whom you are judging in your heart, do so at once, and suffer for him yourself, and
let him go without reproach.”
And Dostoevsky’s character is saying something pretty powerful here: that by freeing your
mind of judgment, you can create a better world.
But how does a mind free of judgment lead to a better world?
The key to creating a better world is correction: we have to be able to correct our mistakes.
And the only way to correct our mistakes is through learning, and only a mind free of
judgment is capable of endless learning.
Learning happens in two steps: prediction, and then correction.
First, you make a prediction about how to achieve a specific goal in the world.
And then if you’re wrong, you correct your prediction until your goal is achieved.
So again, there are two steps to learning: prediction, and then correction.
And a mind free of judgment is naturally predictive.
It naturally makes and corrects its predictions, or in other words, a mind free of judgment
naturally learns.
But how do you free your mind from judgment?
By dropping your desire for certainty.
A mind that desires certainty is a mind that quickly falls into delusion, because certainty
is only possible in delusion.
A certain mind says, “I know.”
It’s sees itself as perfect and believes it has grasped the truth.
And once a mind believes it has the truth, it stops making predictions, and it starts
making judgments.
Because there’s no value in making predictions when you believe your knowledge is perfect.
And because the judgmental mind believes it’s perfect, it’s not open to being corrected,
so naturally it falls into delusion, and delusion leads to suffering.
So how do you drop the desire for certainty?
It happens naturally when you see that certainty is impossible.
How do you know the sun will come up tomorrow?
You don’t—until it’s already happened.
We can be certain of things that have happened in the past, but the future always lies in
uncertainty.
There’s no reason that tomorrow has to be similar to today.
The idea that the future has to resemble the past is an act of faith, and once you really
internalize that, you’ll probably lose the desire for certainty: because it’s a pointless
chase.
And once you drop the desire for certainty, you’ll free your mind of judgment, and once
you free your mind of judgment, you’ll open yourself up to endless learning, and once
you open yourself up to endless learning, you’ll be able to correct your errors, and
once you’re able to correct your errors, you’ll create a better world.
Now let’s take a look at the difference between a mind trapped by judgment and a mind
free of judgment.
Candace is a literary agent, and one day, a writer named Thomas comes into her office.
Thomas is very eccentric, and doesn’t fit the image Candace has in her mind of a successful
writer.
And since Candace has a judgmental mind, she immediately writes him off.
She’s not even interested in testing her knowledge.
/I know what good writers look and act like/, she thinks.
/And he’s not one of them./So Thomas takes his novel to a different agent: Lucy.
Lucy sees him and thinks, /well, he certainly doesn’t look like or act like most successful
authors that come in here.
But hey, that’s just my prediction.
I could be wrong.
Let me read his work and find out./So Lucy reads his work and believes that it’s a
masterpiece.
She realizes her original prediction was wrong and corrects it.
She signs Thomas, whose book goes on to become a once in a lifetime classic–selling over
500 million copies.
And between these two examples, we see the difference between a judgmental mind and a
predictive one.
The predictive mind doubts its own knowledge, and this doubt leads to testing, testing leads
to error, error leads to correction, and correction leads to greatness.
But the judgmental mind is certain of its own knowledge, and certainty leads to delusion,
and delusion leads to suffering.
So if you see the lie behind certainty, you’ll drop your desire for it.
You’ll be OK with living in uncertainty.
And if you drop the desire for certainty, you’ll free yourself of judgment.
And if you free yourself of judgment, if you stop letting others judge you, if you stop
judging yourself and others, you’ll enter a space of endless learning.
And through endless learning, you can correct your errors, and by correcting your errors,
you can create a better world.
That concludes my exploration of Dostoevsky’s teaching in /The Brothers Karamazov/.
As always, this is just my opinion and understanding of Dostoevsky’s teaching, not advice.
Feel free to use this information however you like, and if you have a different take
on the his words, I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.
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And if you’re looking for another video to watch after this one, I recommend watching
my video “Dostoevsky - Be Careful of the Ideas You Plant in Others”.
I’ll put a link to it in the description below and in the top right of the screen
right now.