‘Social’ Intelligence: Do Not Judge

Imagine yourself walking down high street on a brisk Saturday morning (if there are, of course, still people who wake up in the morning on Saturdays).

That wasn’t so difficult, was it now?

Now imagine yourself walking down the road, observing the various people walking past you and refraining from making any comments about how they look, what they are wearing, the weird way in which they are walking, the incredulous amount of children they have, their bizarre haircuts and, finally, their horrid accent.

That was undoubtedly a lot more difficult than the above, was it not?

If you, for one second, thought that it wasn’t, then you were blatantly lying to yourself; something that you should have avoided if you liked yourself, even a bit.

Commenting on other people and their behaviour is inherent to our nature; that is to say, it is perfectly normal for us to be curious about our surroundings. Nevertheless, in our quest to ‘kill the cat’, we tend to forget a couple of pretty important points.

First and foremost, you cannot comment on people as you do on stones, cakes or scones. That’s mainly because inanimate objects have no feelings and cannot really talk back to you to defend or explain themselves (except for the talking stone in the Fantaghiro series...that freaked the Hell out of me when I was little...). People, on the other hand, have feelings which can be hurt, and pretty bad.

Further to the above, we often tend to forget the prime difference between observational and hateful comments; namely, that the former are somewhat acceptable whilst the latter are as unnecessary as pockedoted shirts ( I mean, seriously, who wears those!?).

Having said that, I would now like to turn your attention to one of the times in which you had called an overweight person, who had walked past you, a ‘fatso’.

Did it occur to you, prior to saying that out loud, that the obesity of the said person could have been caused by some sort of coronary disease?

Well now imagine that the said person had heard your spiteful comment, turned around and told you that he was suffering from Hypothyroidism.

That, of course, would make you feel horrible and quite disgusted with yourself; you would most probably apologise to the said person. Alas, it would be to no avail as the damage had already been done.

What you could say, of course, was that a scenario such as the above was quite rare and that the reason for the said person being fat was mainly because he was stuffing himself with McDonald’s, Ben & Jerry’s or Burger King on a daily basis.

Even if that was the case, however, how would you know whether the said person had not gone through a living Hell during the past several months and, as a result, had resorted to eating excessively in order to numb down his depression, mainly because he had no friends to talk to...?

And then you turn up and you further exacerbate his already weakened state by calling him names.

What are you, like, eight?

The most horrible bit about judging people is that we don’t normally do it out of spite; rather, we use such acerbic comments when we are in a group so that we can make those around us laugh and, effectively, become the centre of attention.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying I’m perfect in that respect- I, too, talk much more than I have to at times. Yet, I am doing my utmost best to control myself and have recently adopted quite an effective approach; one which I recommend you use, namely:

If you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

After all, you don’t judge a book by its cover; why would you do so with a person...?