Delphic Maxim 25: Find fault with no one

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

25. Find fault with no one

Sometimes the Delphic Maxims swing from being fairly obvious rules for life — the sort of basic stuff that Jordan Peterson would write about (sans silly references to lobsters, or weird ideas about gender roles). Sometimes they are slightly more complex, and they need to be challenged or inverted for our times (for example, intend to get married). Sometimes, and this is the case today, the advice sounds like it makes sense on the surface, but we know that it’s much harder to achieve in practice.

How is it possible to ‘find fault with no one’, when every day we seem to be confronted with a never-ending pile of faults and grievances from the people around us. Humans are perfect, we make mistakes all the time, and quite often those mistakes have negative impacts on other people. So ‘finding no fault’ seems like a bit of a tall order.

I’m going to do some interpretation here (interpretation, incidentally, was described by Susan Sontag as the analysts revenge on art, so perhaps I am taking revenge on this maxim).

The view I generally hold is that nobody around me is outright malicious. Rather than blame ‘evil’ or bad intentions for the lame things that people do, I prefer to assume ignorance or, more harshly, stupidity. This often applies to politics as well — don’t give politicians too much credit, I feel like they’re often as much at sea as anyone else. The point is, we should never ascribe to nefarious motives what can be more comfortably explained by stupidity.

If we carry this mindset through our lives, it gives us two advantages. First, it means we recognise that we must be prepared for people to let us down. We practice ‘defensive driving’, not because we like driving slow or because we think someone is out to kill us, but because we want to be covered in case someone makes a mistake. Expect that people will make mistakes in all domains and build in measures and contingencies in case it happens. Redundant systems are more robust than optimised ones — this is the lesson from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. You might think it’s a waste, but when something goes catastrophically wrong the people with redundancies built-in are the ones who come out on top.

Secondly, it means that we’re not carrying around a negative judgement of people’s character. The classic example for me comes from my experience with students at university. The vast majority of the time when a mistake is made (a poorly referenced assignment, a terrible use of a meme as an ‘academic source’ in an essay, bad writing style or structure), the problem generally isn’t laziness or maliciousness, it’s that this kind of work is difficult and quite often people aren’t yet equipped with the skills. I personally will agonise over an email for ages before sending it because I’m worried about bothering someone, or that I’ll seem like a goose, or that I’ve worded something unclearly.

If I’m that worried about sending an email, imagine how many other people are! It pays to remember that we’re all in the same situation: human, fallible, plagued by emotions and anxieties. So how can we fault the character of a person?

What are the exceptions here? Because there have to be some, right?

Well it is possible to find fault in actions and products. Take the focus off the individual, and instead look at the work or ‘the output’ (to put it in grossly industrial terms). When I mark an essay, I’m not marking ‘a person’, I’m marking a piece of writing. We should be applying this principle across our lives: don’t find faults in people, find faults in systems, processes and products.

But what if a person does have a fault in their character — what if they are a bad person? This can happen, but it’s exceptionally rare. Ask yourself whether it is the person who is at fault, or if it is their practices (the things that they do). Practices can be corrected, but character…that’s getting metaphysical. We’re getting down into the depths of a soul — and I refer to soul in the sense that Aristotle would use it: the ‘mind’ or subjectivity of a person.

Bad people are rare indeed, but they’re out there, of course. That’s not a fault you find, but one that likely finds you, because that’s the kind of energy they project into the world. Don’t search for that!

The lesson of this maxim is about civility and our relationship to others. We all make mistakes, and we all want people to be understanding when we do. So for the sake of our community of mistake-makers, don’t fault the person when the fault is in the thing itself.