How Do We Really Evaluate the People in Our Lives?

How do we assess the value of something? The answer to this question determines most of the choices we make in our life - or with our life, rather! The goods and services we consume and produce, the places we live and visit, the foods we eat and the very manner in which we utilize our time, are dependent on an implicit or explicit notion of the value we attach to the implications of these choices. 

I think this is one of life's fundamental questions; what say? It is a tricky one too. Many conflicts - at home and in the world arena - owe their origin to differences in the means employed to evaluate things, and an inability to reconcile the divergent conclusions reached as a result of such valuations. Let us take an example. A school-leaving student needs to make a decision on her choice of career. Now, how does one evaluate the plethora of career options available? Who can be trusted to what extent to give the right answers, or questions? Do we even need the right answers, after all? How do we evaluate the views expressed by parents, mentors, guides, professionals and the student herself? Which views hold - and should hold - how much weight? I have seen peace suffer as a result of differing answers or views on these questions; most likely, you too would have been witness to such dilemmas. 

A superior ability to value can indeed stand us in good stead (think Warren Buffet, taking the business world; Mahatma Gandhi from the realm of enlightened leadership); an under-developed capacity to spot the good and the bad can make our life (or after-life) more miserable than it needs to be!

Alright. If evaluating something is difficult, what about evaluating someone? 

The Difficult Problem of Evaluating Someone

Our instincts would most likely tell us that evaluating someone ought to be a much more difficult endeavour than evaluating something. For one, a human being is capable of behaviours that are more complex, more diverse and less predictable than most "things", in most situations, time included. The human person is also an infinite animate being, capable of being and living in the Spiritual World Wide Web of Life. She has the capacity for emotive and soft expression of the inner yearnings of the human being. Besides, her ability to architect her life according to her reality and aspiration invests in her a distinctive capacity to transcend previously realized versions of reality. The human potential to do "the good, the bad and the ugly" is limitless; couple this with the human power to develop this potential itself, and we have, in front of us, a creation whose God-given potential is not only unimagined, but even unimaginable. 

So, while we are all simple at one level, at many other levels, we are complex too. While we are little beings, we are infinite too. And while we can make ourselves predictable in certain ways, we can choose to be unpredictable too. These are at least three factors that make the problem of evaluating someone a difficult, if not an impossible, problem.

But wait, do we ever need to tackle this problem? Is a problem a problem if it never needs to be addressed, let alone solved?

Is it Really Necessary to Evaluate People?

Do we really need to estimate the value of others? Perhaps no! Let us consider this statement: "Bob is a good singer". Is this an evaluation of Bob as a person? Not quite. This is an evaluative statement more on Bob's singing rather than on Bob as an individual. It appears to me that this is true of most situations in life. Even when we assess a person as trustworthy or untrustworthy, it is his/her trustworthiness that is being evaluated, not the person itself.

And it works for us. In any given decision situation, there are certain attributes in a person that we think we know and regard as important determinants of our decision. And we tend to be content in coming to a decision based on these qualities of the individual. So, a prospective employer may look for creativity, passion and past experience, for instance. Evaluation based on these criteria may be sufficient for an acceptably good decision.

So, evaluating people - holistically, as individual human beings - may be altogether unnecessary. But wait...

Is it Really Unnecessary to Evaluate People?

We human beings are complex, beautiful beings. We do strange things - even those things that are commonly strange, strangely common! Here is another example...

Listening to you speak in public, I may be able to form a reasonably confident opinion of your oratory skills, without much difficulty. Surely, forming a more or less reliable opinion of you as a complete person would be much much more difficult. However, I may find it eminently convenient to completely forget this distinction. Assuming that the little experience I have of you is mostly that of my familiarity with your oratory talent, it would make my life a lot simpler if I were to use my evaluation of your public speaking expertise as a proxy or easy alternative for coming to an assessment of you yourself. 

Now, one can find fault with me for being so irrational, unscientific and error-prone in my approach. However, there could be a justification for adopting this imperfect method of evaluation. The stereotyping, the convenient sampling technique adopted above makes life easy; it enables one to bring down the inherent complexity of life to manageable levels. It enables me to use a consciously imperfect and incomplete evaluation of you as a guidepost to navigating our shared space in this journey of life, in the hope that our subsequent life collisions would enable me to keep refining my view, even if imperfectly and incompletely.

So, whether or not it is necessary, we do seem to evaluate others, almost as if by nature.

Do We (Really) Evaluate People?

I am about to conclude this post, but I feel tempted to say these are my opening thoughts. I think besides and before reflecting on whether it is necessary to evaluate people, and how to go about doing it, it would be worthwhile to reflect whether we do it or not. How often do we look at and assess others and ourselves as total human beings? As infinite beings made in the image of a higher power, with infinite potential, for good and for bad? And how do we evaluate them?

Stopping here, with these starting and presumably contradictory questions...

PS: I wanted to write on the subject of underestimating others; I am happy that I ended up writing on something else. Hope to get back soon with the underestimating topic. :) 

Thank you very much. Your comments - and shares - are most welcome.

- Dheep

dheepjoym@gmail.com, @DheepJoy

August 23, 2017