Do You Think Every Person Should Be Granted the Benefit of the Doubt?

“One can only return to the fact that even the most ordinary, good-hearted, intelligent people are literally prone to believing the most blatantly nonsensical untruths. And this comes from the realization that there are some opinions and some beliefs so incredibly inane, we may actually on occasion feel insane for not believing them; and that is probably because in giving the benefit of the doubt we self-doubt, we convince ourselves into lame passivity and blind acceptance, we tell ourselves, ‘Maybe I’m just missing something here.”

― Criss Jami, Healology

Who deserves the benefit of the doubt?

Giving the benefit of the doubt to “inherently good” people when we notice their inconsistency with walking their talk is a virtue I do encourage, undoubtedly.

Let’s try to explore what gives birth to the phase-shift in the first place, shall we? This logic is exclusively valid for kind-hearted folks, again.

Simply put, the talk is delivered by the conscious mind. It is what we wish for ourselves: the willingness to be validated, respected, looked up to, etc. The walk, on the other side, stems from our subconscious program.

We need to be mindful of the truth that most family systems, on a global scale, are dysfunctional to some extent.

You can think of it as a cultural and generational curse that played a major role in conditioning human beings and discriminating against their intrinsic worth to the advantage of achieving and competing — fueled by a scarcity mentality.

The conditioned people become parents. They vehiculate the same legacy to their offspring: they love them conditionally and/or inconsistently. They disconnect them from their true selves and divine gifts.

They write an invasive subconscious program for their kids, given it is all that they can offer while still diving into life with their own heavy psychological baggage and toxic mental patterns.

More to the point, human behavior is merely a by-product of the quality of our subconscious program. So here is the deal: as long as we will remain uneducated and trapped in our denial vicious circle, the inconsistency in walking the talk will be the expectation, unfortunately.

Education along with humility is vital to the process of awakening the spirit, accessing our self-awareness endowment, seeing our numerous limiting beliefs, and re-writing our program in alignment with the universal principles so that we can set our soul free.

Appealingly, even some of the most awakened spirits may fall short and be out of their integrity at some point. Bear in mind that we all make mistakes. Shortcomings are human, particularly if we have too much on our plate.

In such circumstances, the most important detail is to admit it and apologize sincerely. If the relationship is healthy enough, the incident will naturally become part of the past.

What do we require to give the benefit of the doubt and what do we risk in the absence of it?

Interestingly, for us to give the benefit of the doubt only to good people, we need:

• Having already developed our observation and critical thinking skills to the highest levels,

• Having reconnected with our purest gut upfront.

Why is that relevant at all? Because, if not, we could enable a manipulator/abuser. That’s how they can do so much harm in the world without being held accountable. It is the enablers’ responsibility, sadly, as uncomfortable as this truth may sound!

Let’s admit to ourselves, in complete transparency, that those troubled souls live among us and exist everywhere: in our families, in our friends’ circles, in the workplace, in the gym, in our church or mosque or temple — you name it!

The most subtle and dangerous group are the malignant narcissists/psychopaths who do not display anti-social traits.

They are very charming. In many cases, they occupy prestigious positions in corporates or politics. They can be extremely wealthy while exploiting every single human being and circumstance to secure their ends.

Generally speaking, they are excellent with technical matters. It is the reason why we find them in organizations’ Executive roles more frequently than we would wish it to be true.

They needed to compensate for their emotional emptiness by training their memory and ingurgitating the maximal amount of data possible to “succeed” and confirm their “grandiosity” narrative as a survival strategy to their childhood trauma.

Appealingly, those human predators come, in most cases, from a narcissistic family system. Nonetheless, kids of narcissists can either grow to become narcissists (inherently not good) or empaths (inherently good): two polar opposites. A third alternative is suffering from anxiety, PTSD, and/or addictions.

It is still not clear why some children become narcissists and others empaths, but it is more likely related to an element of free-will when they were learning and deciding how best to cope with their harsh environment.

Malignant narcissists/psychopaths are characterized by their extreme callousness, cold-heartedness, and penchants for manipulation and predation. They are wholly disconnected from their conscience; consequently, remorseless for a reason:

According to research published in THE LANCET Psychiatry journal, their brains process punishment in a very different way. The researchers found out, through the fMRI, that the processing was flawed; hence the same for the capacity to be affected in decision making and behavior by punishment.

They found interneuronal communication pattern abnormalities. Result: those individuals are immune to punishment because their brains don’t process the reality of it in a standard way.

There is no evidence they were born the way they are. Given the brain is a remarkably plastic instrument, chances are high they are their household creation.

I love this assumption, to be frank. I like to believe we were all granted the same character gifts at the moment of our conception, which was altered by the irresponsible caregivers afterward.

Last thoughts

In summary, if we give the benefit of the doubt to a remorseless monster like the one described above or a less dangerous individual from the Cluster B disorders group, the only outcome we could generate would be unfairness, trauma, physical diseases, meaningless pain, and chaos!

Last but not least, this is another reason why I care so much about parenting. It is, to me, the source of all the servant leaders we admire, the imbalanced kind souls, the bad guys, and the evil ones.

In those moments, I wish I could have some formal authority to create a special bill of law. It would oblige every single adult who plans to have a baby to take a psychological/mental health test and allow or deny them access to parenthood depending on their results.

The prohibition text would be something like “You need to first work on your program” for kind souls, and “you can go and f*ck yourself” for any of the Cluster B disorders group.