Give yourself the permission to think ill of others

Mercy, by definition, is not justice.

One of the biggest life-changing decisions I’ve made was to give myself the permission to criticize others… To myself. Just have thoughts that are not deliberately kind and approving of others, no matter what they do. I had a bad habit of always stopping myself from thinking anything negative of other people, so I always walked around blindfolded thinking everyone around me was… Something other than what they were. I always forced myself to consider others as either my superiors or as my equals, no matter what they were in reality, and if I felt “superior” to others, I felt horrible about myself and my “narcissism”. And yet… It is safe to assume that there are people who are both inferior to you or superior to you, and you fall somewhere in between, depending on which measuring stick you take.

I needed to start observing others in a realistic light, and to put myself in the correct bracket, too. To my horror, for one thing, I noticed that due to my habit of putting myself down I managed to act ‘superior’ towards the very people who I wanted to worship. The reason is, that THEY saw me as their equal or their superior (too), and when I failed to be friendly towards them, thinking I was less than them, they interpreted it as me being “too good” for their company, which was the opposite of how I was feeling.

Also, I blinded myself from seeing the motivations of people who were blatantly abusing my kindness and good will and allowed them to not only harm me, but to harm those who I loved, too, because I refused to see them for who they truly were… Turn the blind eye is not a good guide to life, all it does is to protect those who need to be kept an eye on. All I can think of is the advice: “be wary of false prophets…” Turn the blind eye literally tells you to ignore those who act in self-interest and abusive of others… A better rule would be: Observe others, know what they are doing, don’t lie to yourself or others about what you observe, but don’t be cruel or unjust in your actions…

Showing mercy to one person means not giving justice to those who were hurt.

Therefore, the wrong-doer always gets off easier than what they deserve.

Not cool.

And again, it’s not like you have to be cruel, you simply have to stop feeding the situation by allowing things to continue the way that they are going.

What also happens when you fail to see others in a realistic light is that the blind is starting to lead the seeing, who is walking around blindfolded. This leads to a situation, where we can’t criticise a faulty theory, for instance, an erroneous idea, thought, lesson or whatever, because we have to pretend we didn’t notice another person’s blunder or faulty logic. Not all untruth is told in ill-intent, but due to simply not knowing better. Those are things we have to start paying attention to.

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