Don’t Surrender Judgment, Improve It
For Karl Kraus, who was right, but it wasn’t enough.
The Sucker and His Companions
“There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.” The line is usually attributed to P.T. Barnum, which is itself instructive: Barnum almost certainly never said it. The best evidence points to a competitor named David Hannum, who said it about Barnum’s audience. The most famous warning about credulity has been circulating for over a century under the wrong name, and almost nobody checks. We repeat it, we nod at its wisdom, and we demonstrate its thesis in the act of quoting it.
The supply of people willing to exploit credulity has never been the bottleneck. Something went wrong with the faculty that was supposed to protect us. Did we let it atrophy or surrender it altogether? Did we think we were better for it? We will take it up, but only when forced.
“Don’t Judge”: The Phrase That Ate a Faculty
“Don’t judge” became a thought-arresting cliche. It sounds generous. It sounds open-minded. But it is a catastrophe. The phrase that should have been “don’t prejudge” was shortened by one syllable and reversed in meaning. Prejudice is contempt prior to investigation. Judgment is what stands between you and bigotry. We aren’t even making distinctions, which is necessary before we can attempt a judgment.
The void where judgment should be does not stay empty. It fills with opinion, which feels enough like thinking that the substitution goes unnoticed. But opinion answers to nothing. It requires no evidence, no consistency, no revision. It is a private comfort, which is precisely why it is useless in public. A society that runs on opinions has no mechanism for correction, because there is nothing to correct. A society that runs on judgment has tools for revision, because it has admitted it can be wrong.
When we stop judging, we do not enter some neutral state of openness. We hand the work to whoever is willing to do it for us, or we let habit choose, which is no choice at all.
Hannah Arendt saw where this ends. “If everybody always lies to you,” she warned, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”[1] A small irony worth pausing for: the version of this quote most people encounter on social media is itself a fabrication. Someone reassembled Arendt’s words into a tidier package and put her name on it. It circulates endlessly, rarely checked. A warning about the collapse of judgment, consumed without judgment.
Arendt was talking about governments that lie, but that is a different problem than a population that has stopped judging. We are deluged with so much data every day that everything flattens out. Content arrives like weather: something you cannot control and something it would never occur to you to judge. You do not doubt the weather. You do not ask it to justify itself. Nobody wrote it. Nobody is behind it. How many of us have come to receive information the same way and abdicated a vital capacity?
Content as Weather
Kraus: “The mission of the press is to spread the intellect and simultaneously to destroy the capacity to receive it.”
We clarify facts to have a better understanding of reality. When we cannot confirm the facts ourselves, we look for consistency or its absence in what other people report. This is distinct from opinion. If one man’s opinion of an object is that it is a biscotti, and another man’s opinion is that it is a turd, they can both be wrong, but they cannot both be right. Relativism is exposed the moment anything real is at stake. Let us assume one of them is correct. It would be worthwhile to make a judgment, and hopefully a good one, before you dip that object in your coffee.
The feed wants to keep your attention. That is its purpose. Your life, your comments, your reactions feed a loop that manipulates you through small rewards and punishments. It controls what you see. None of this requires you to exercise judgment. The feed dominates you when you are passively on intake and controls what you think and imagine.
There is a further asymmetry. Content with integrity tends to go downstream. Something that actually changes how you see, people keep to themselves; they go quiet. Conspiracy theories, rage bait, and lies go viral because they are engineered to provoke the impulse to share before you have judged. What circulates most is what has been judged least.
Our Imagination Is Occupied Territory
Kraus: “How does one become a journalist? No ideas and the ability to express them.”
Content consumed passively does not merely misinform. It occupies the imagination. For those who have renounced judgment, it does not compete with their own thinking; it replaces thinking. What you imagine as possible, what you imagine as threatening, what you imagine as desirable: these are no longer generated from encounter with the world. They are installed.
Bertrand Russell, writing after two world wars, warned that propaganda would become increasingly scientific.[2] His fear was well founded. The real cost of surrendered judgment is not that we believe the wrong things but that our thinking and imagination have been colonized by whoever is most adept at seizing our attention. Our thoughts are no longer ours. We did not arrive at them through judgment.
Three Steps from Reality
Kraus: “Its population chases events. But it experiences the event only as a report, and therefore journalism can wrest away the very events it has just provided.”
A report about a cake is not sweet. You cannot taste it. You cannot judge the cake from the report, and you certainly cannot judge it from someone’s opinion about the report. This is obvious when the subject is cake. It is so much less obvious when the subject is war, disease, famine, or crime. The opinion you heard about the report someone wrote about an event you did not witness is three steps removed from reality, and each step is a chance for distortion, omission, and manipulation. Most of what you consume is not even reports. It is opinions about reports. And opinions about reports are not knowledge. They are atmosphere.
Ten Criteria for Judgment
Think about the content you consumed in the last week. Was it all reduced to mere content? Did you make a single distinction about any of it? Not a reaction. Not an opinion. A distinction: this is true and that is not; this is evidence and that is speculation; this person is reporting and that person is selling. If you have an answer, good. If you don’t, the absence of an answer is the answer.
Judgment is not a special skill. It is a natural faculty that works when it hasn’t been disabled. The following criteria are not rules to memorize. They are what judgment already does when you let it.
The first four criteria are about appetite: is this worth consuming? The remaining six are about safety: has it been handled properly?
1. Did I learn something?
Not did I hear something new, but did my understanding change?
2. Was it beautiful for its own sake?
Some things are worth encountering because they are made well, said well, or shown well. Beauty can be empty ornamentation, a flower on a turd. It can also arrest your habits long enough to see something new.
3. Did it reveal something about myself?
Did it show me a pattern I hadn’t noticed, a contradiction I’d been living with, a possibility I hadn’t considered?
4. Did it give me a better way of explaining something than I had before?
And if it is better, can I say why it is better? If I can’t, I haven’t judged it. I’ve just been impressed.
Now ask whether the food has been handled properly. We know what happens when we eat tainted food. The same applies to information.
5. Does it make a claim or just create a feeling?
If I can’t state what it claimed, it wasn’t informing me. It was conditioning me.
6. Who benefits if I believe this?
Follow the incentive. Who made this, why, and what do they want me to do or feel afterward?
7. What is left out?
Absence is harder to notice than presence, and often more revealing. What context would change the meaning?
8. Does it flatter me?
Kraus: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his listeners, so that they believe they are as clever as he.”
Content that confirms what I already think and makes me feel smart for thinking it deserves the most scrutiny, not the least.
9. Is it asking me to act or react quickly?
Urgency is a manipulation tool. Legitimate information rarely needs an immediate emotional response.
10. Would I accept this from the other side?
Apply the same standard I would use if the source or conclusion were politically reversed. This is the hardest criterion because it requires me to imagine my own standards applied against my preferences. That is intellectual honesty.
Ideas vs. What Exists
Kraus: “You do not even live once.”
Everything described so far, the surrendered capacity, the occupied imagination, the tainted information mistaken for nourishment, is a symptom of something deeper: the preference for ideas over what exists. When we live inside a feed, we are living inside a set of ideas about reality rather than in contact with reality itself. This is not a philosophical error someone arrives at through bad reasoning. It is a condition we fall into when the imagination has been auto-populated.
Judgment requires contact with what exists. The ten criteria offered above are tools for restoring that contact. They do not guarantee you will see clearly. You cannot falsify a hedge, only a claim. Right or wrong, the judgment will be yours, and yours to improve.
Kraus’s Warning and Its Limits
Kraus saw all of this a century ago. He held the language of journalism, politics, and patriotism up against the reality it claimed to describe, and he exposed the gap with a precision no one has matched since. His work did not stop World War I. It did not stop the rise of the Nazis. It did not stop World War II. The most brilliant diagnosis of the empty phrase in the history of Western letters changed nothing.
Do we notice this? Do we recognize that none of the conversations we have had in the last ten years has stopped the rise of fascism? Can we admit that we failed to reach the people who were more impressed with lies? And can we ask the harder question: how do we encourage others to make better judgments when we ourselves are consuming content without judging it?
The work is what there is to do, not because it promises results but because the alternative is complicity. Camus understood this. Kraus understood it before him. He kept writing. The catastrophe came anyway. He kept writing.
Witness What You Take In
Every piece of content that reaches you is testimony. Someone made it, for a reason, with an effect in mind. To treat it like weather is to volunteer to be the sucker. To treat it as testimony is to claim the one thing no algorithm can replace: the authority of your own judgment.
That authority was not taken from you by a conspiracy. It was surrendered, one “don’t judge” at a time. You can take it back.
If you’re not interested in using the faculties that life gave you, what the hell are you doing?
Endnotes
[1] The full passage appears in Hannah Arendt’s 1974 interview with Roger Errera, published posthumously as “Hannah Arendt: From an Interview,” The New York Review of Books, October 26, 1978. The complete text reads: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
A cautionary note: the version of this passage most widely circulated on social media is a fabricated composite that begins “This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie…” Arendt never wrote or spoke those words. The composite was assembled from several of her works and repackaged for easy sharing. Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz documented this at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College (“On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations,” Amor Mundi, August 4, 2024). That a quote about the destruction of judgment circulates in a form nobody bothered to verify is itself evidence of the condition it describes.
[2] Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), Chapter 7, “Can a Scientific Society Be Stable?”, first delivered as a lecture on November 29, 1949. Russell wrote: “I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology… Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda.”