Lyric Essay

             As humans we judge other people’s personalities based on what people tell us, no matter how much we know it isn’t their business to tell us. “That guy over there in the hoodie must be dangerous, since you’re a girl, you should be wary of guys who look like that.” Things like this are always spouted about and we just accept it. We take things at face value without bothering to see the note he left in his room apologizing to his family or the fact that he was walking towards a bridge. Regardless of all the times we are wrong, we still rely on human judgement whether it be for comfort or just because we’re confused.

              Is there even a real way to judge someone’s character? The justice system certainly thinks there is. You gather a boatload of evidence against this person and then hope that you can find the truth. But how does a jury of 6 to 12 people decide what a person’s fate should be? Do they just suddenly have an omniscient perspective on the situation the moment they step in the “jury box?” No. The justice system is all about debate and who has the better argument to sway the jury. So, inevitably, there have been times where the jury is persuaded by the lawyer disputing that their client is innocent when they’re not. So, the jury, who holds the defendant’s life in their hands, is now liable for letting a criminal loose. Hmm… How to remedy this? IDK. The jury is just working with what they have and that’s all we can really expect. That is, until, of course, some miraculous truth serum like the one from Divergent comes out.

  Okay, let’s move onto something more intellectual, I hope. When we read, we rely a lot on the person/people who are interacting with the story who serve no real purpose other than to help us as the reader. Not following? Let me explain. They’re essentially just the narrators. Take Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby, for example. He didn’t really have a role; he was just the anchor of the story. Nick just followed Gatsby, fawning over him, while Jay was using him to get to Daisy. Poor Nick. But anyway, he’s the crutch of the story giving us, as the audience, a gateway to relate to a situation that we can’t see for ourselves. We rely on the narrators to tell us what they perceive to be the truth because they’re usually the most “normal” characters. One major instance of when we depend on these “narrators” is when we read plays. We can’t see the actors’ facial expressions, nor is there a legitimate narrator usually. In Oedipus Rex, we use the dialogue of the chorus to tell us what’s going on. While we’re hunched over reading the play like a maniac thinking “dang this dude Oedipus really be making all the wrong moves here,” the chorus is saying how wonderful he is, pulling our attention and making us realize how appealing he was to the people as a ruler. The chorus acts as the witness in a trial and shows exactly how they perceive Oedipus. They truly believed he was a good ruler. Or did they just think that because they were so appreciative of his ability to solve the riddle of the Sphinx?

            Our senses can always steer us wrong, especially under high-pressure situations, like in Oedipus and Nazi Germany. The people of Germany initially believed Hitler to be a great man destined to bring about the end of their economic depression. The Germans didn’t see anything wrong with handing their whole country into the arms of a soldier who claimed he could cure their land. He did end up doing that, of course, but only by pulling the innocent civilians of Germany into a horrific World War. The country’s fate was determined by the people and their decision to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. Going off of this example, to what extent can we truly rely on our peers to make the right judgement call? In reference to elections, those of us 18 and older hold the power to elect the person we want to represent us as a population. We don’t know who is good or bad or if there even is such a thing. All we know is that there are these candidates, and these are the things they claim to support. We are forced to go off of the information their teams choose to give to news sources and use that to determine whether we want them or not. 

Aristotle writes that a character must be “good,” and to be good, their “choices are good.” But how do we define the choices as “good?” This type of question is essentially the baseline for how we make judgements. How do we define a person as good, bad, sad, or mad? We learn from our experience to associate certain traits with each personality but that doesn’t always tell the full story. In fact, it NEVER does. We form these judgements about people based on these assumptions and never truly grasp the true nature of a person’s character. In the end, there is no clear-cut formula or exact definition for what makes a person good or bad. We put so much emphasis in our lives to “figuring people out” in order to anticipate what they’re going to do and how they will interact with us. I know it seems so bleak to think that we can’t even guarantee the truth from our own senses, but it’s true. We need to form our opinions and judgements based on true interaction with others if we need to make judgements. A video by Dhar Mann Studios highlights the unfortunate outcomes of our false assumptions. Assuming it’s true that we judge others using other people’s judgements, who use others’ judgements, do we really have any power over our thoughts?