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Been thinking on the idea of "Locus of Control" - the idea of whether you feel things are more dependent on factors you control vs external circumstances and other actors, I realize there's an interesting concept of "Locus of Judgement"... whose judgement are you most worried about. I guess it looks something like this:

For some people, judgement is coming from the smaller "you" at the center there... your head and your heart make judgements. But for other folks, it's that dominating external figure that matters the most. And it gets messed up - certain kinds of anxiety can come from internalizing the judgement of others, living in fear of what they think and imagining horrible consequences if you go against their wishes.

Then there's that weird blue circle of figures I added... that's my crude way of representing striving for the objective view - like, the "God's-Eye View", the viewpoint from God's Throne that I feel exists even though I'm not sure that there's a Divine Butt in that chair.

I was always willing to stand up to authority, I think because of my faith in that view - not that I could be confident I had that correct view, but that it existed. Authority is only legitimate to the extent that it represented a good faith effort to manifest and further that objective truth.

This (probably too cluttered to be useful) diagram came to me while reading "Why Buddhism is True" - Robert Wright is pointing me to some further reading, like Thomas Nagel's "The View from Nowhere" - I have hopes that that will explore and extend ideas about the importance of presuming the existence of the objective view.

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