Behind The Blame And Forgiveness-The Assumptions

Ask a bunch of people if forgiveness is good. And chances are high that all will probably tell you that it is. According to most experts, forgiveness is something to which we should aspire, the more wronged we have been, the more divine it is to be able to forgive. Now ask people if blame is good or bad. And most likely the answer you will get will be that blame is bad. And yet to forgive, we have to blame. If we do not blame in the first place, there is nothing to forgive. But there is a step before blame and forgiveness that needs our consideration.

Before we blame, we have to experience the outcome which is negative. If our behaviour resulted in something positive, blame would hardly make sense to have an existence. Those who see more negativity in the world are then those more likely to allocate blame. Evaluations reside in the evaluator, not in outcomes. As we too often forget outcomes are not good or bad depending on how we choose to view them. It is in this choice that our greatest control resides. But it is not always that we find the good. Then how can we deal with the hurt caused by others? We nurse our feelings and too often feel self-righteous. We have evaluated their behaviour and judged their behaviour and judged that they have behaved badly.

We implicitly assume that our actions are right. We further assume that all sensible people would do the same thing. Therefore, if you behave differently from me, then presumably you behave differently from all of us and you must then be wrong. This would be true if there were only one perspective from which to view behaviour. We fail to consider that the other person's behaviour made sense from a perspective other than the one from which we are evaluating it. This kind of evaluative false consensus of everyone would do what I did in that situation leaves us blaming, forgiving or needing forgiveness, and then resting on a single minded view of events. If I am right, you must be wrong. If we recognize that multiple perspectives are valid, then we may both be right.

Behaviour makes different sense depending on the perspective from which it is viewed. If we see the sense of the behaviour we probably would find that if we framed the situation the same way, we would have behaved the same way. The same behaviour makes many different senses. If we don't see that, then we will remain stuck in an evaluative mind set. In this evaluative mind set, we will then experience as negative outcomes that which could have been experienced as positive. If we experience negative outcomes, then we will be tempted to find someone to blame. To err is human but to understand divine.