Karma is an interesting idea.
It's originally a concept from Hinduism and Buddhism, and claims that good or bad deeds accrue on what amounts to a Life Ledger, and not only will result in positive or negative payback later in this life, but will affect the quality of rebirth you're granted in subsequent lives (in one's saṃsāra, to use the Sanskrit term). The word karma itself is from Sanskrit, and combines the meaning of "action or deed" with that of "intent."
Here in the West, the idea's been swiped and (usually) disconnected from anything having to do with reincarnation. It's come to mean "payback," usually of an unexpected sort. How many times have you heard someone say, "Karma will catch up with him sooner or later"? Even the Bible has the evocative line, "Who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind."
It's an appealing idea, at least for those of us who would like there to be some fairness in the world. Too often, dishonest, cheating, lying assholes (*koff koff koff Donald Trump koff koff *) get away scot-free, and deserving, hard-working people can't catch a break to save their lives. Believing that there is going to be some kind of cosmic balancing of the accounts would be mighty reassuring.
Interesting, though, that people's attitudes toward karma vary dramatically depending on whose karma we're talking about. A study that came out this week in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, by Cindel White, Atlee Lauder, and Mina Aryaie, found that regardless of religious belief (or non-belief), people tend to associate good karma with themselves, and bad karma with other people.
Asked to come up with a karmic experience about themselves, 69% of participants described some good deed that was unexpectedly rewarded; when it was about other people, a full 82% of participants recounted a bad deed that resulted in the evildoer receiving their just deserts. And this trend held no matter where the participants were from.
"We found very similar patterns across multiple cultural contexts, including Western samples, where we know people often think about themselves in exaggeratedly positive ways, and samples from Asian countries where people are more likely to be self-critical," said Cindel White of York University, who was lead author on the study. "The positive bias in karmic self-perceptions is a bit weaker in the Indian and Singaporean samples compared with U.S. samples, but across all countries, participants were much more likely to say that other people face karmic punishments while they receive karmic rewards."So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right? One reason, actually, has to do with the feeling of being wrong. So let me ask you guys something... How does it feel -- emotionally -- how does it feel to be wrong? Dreadful. Thumbs down. Embarrassing... Thank you, these are great answers, but they're answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you're wrong? Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? I mean, it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny... But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything.
I'll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Looney Tunes cartoon where there's this pathetic coyote who's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine -- he's a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what's funny -- at least if you're six years old -- is that the coyote's totally fine too. He just keeps running -- right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he's in mid-air. That's when he falls. When we're wrong about something -- not when we realize it, but before that -- we're like that coyote after he's gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.
The White et al. karma study is further evidence that we have a dangerous blind spot with regard to our own capacity for getting it wrong. Not only do we have the sense that it's other people who make errors, it's also other people who do bad stuff, who should be on the receiving end of the Cosmic Morality Squad's efforts to keep things in balance. As for us? We should finally get our Just Reward for being the good people we've been all along, right?
Of course right.
Like I said, it's an certainly appealing concept, because all too often there appears to be no justice at all in this world. But we have to be careful about how we evaluate our fellow humans, because just about everyone is a confusing amalgam of good and bad, pure motives and not-so-pure ones, sometimes varying on a minute-by-minute time scale. And that includes ourselves. Remember the wise words of J. R. R. Tolkien, spoken through the character Gandalf. Frodo has just snapped out that Gollum deserved to die for what he'd done, and Gandalf responds, "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
