What lies behind each of them? Reflection invites us to understand a cause and its effects in order to undo both.
Reflection invites impartiality: viewing the situation from outside the scene, impersonally, from the perspective of an observer watching something they might once have been involved in. Their own experience would give them a deeper understanding, while they would also observe with the detachment that impartiality entails.
But when does that same reflection turn into condemnation? When partiality enters and, therefore, when it becomes personal. Condemnation always involves division and taking sides: a position from which impartiality disappears completely and any reflection becomes biased, clouded, and distorted by deep subjectivity.
Condemnation means placing oneself above another, which means feeling morally superior. It is rather like someone who scores ten out of ten on an exam looking down their nose at someone who barely manages a five.
That moral superiority, in turn, involves a false empathy in which we imagine ourselves in the other person’s position, thinking we could have done better under the same circumstances. That would be a monumental fallacy, because it overlooks the hundreds of millions of factors, conditioning influences, and chains of events that brought the other person to where they were.
It would seem reasonable to think that people do not suffer for pleasure, but because they have not found a better way of doing things. Moreover, their ingrained habit of lying to themselves prevents any improvement; those lies also serve to justify their disastrous way of acting.
Reflection unravels absurdities, especially our own, though we often see them more clearly outside ourselves. That is why another person can often be a valuable mirror in which to study ourselves.
Condemnation never seeks to help; it seeks to point the finger at and pass sentence on the disadvantaged, the foolish, the useless, the reckless, the stubborn, and the proud. It seeks to condemn them to remain trapped in their tortuous cycles, from which they could not escape without a helping hand offering genuine understanding—an all-encompassing understanding.
Condemnation itself makes no sense, and those who condemn merely expose their inability to understand. Without that understanding, there can be no real, lasting solutions, only childish fantasies of heroes and victims, or perpetrators and victims.