Judgement

There is a concept in Christianity known as Judgement Day, the basic idea is that there will come a day when God will pass judgement on humanity and that its achievements and its sins would be weighed against one another to determine its fate.  The idea is one that is also present in different forms in many other religions, that ultimately there will be judgement and retribution or reward for what you have done.  For society as a whole beyond religion this concept is mirrored in the concepts of justice and the outcomes of the judicial process. 

Both of these however require a certain amount of faith, the former in a more literal sense as the date of judgement day in Christianity is unknown and might not even happen in your lifetime if it ever happened at all.  The latter requires faith in the people who are tasked with upholding the laws they pass judgement in deference to, again you might not live to see justice upheld if it is upheld at all.  A judge interprets the law, those interpretations can vary widely, that is, if the case ever makes it to a court to begin with.

Reducing both to their most fundamental tenets you can say that they both incorporate one simple core belief, that if you are good you will be rewarded and if you are bad you will be punished.  The trouble with this core belief is that it is objectively false.  Regardless of your definition of good and evil, there are countless examples of people who were evil to the core who were never punished for their actions by all definitions, in fact in many cases they were rewarded.  There are countless examples of people who were good to their core who were never rewarded for being so and many more who were actively punished for being so.

You can go further with platitudes like "a good deed is its own reward" and realise that these exist to placate those who have been good but have not been rewarded for doing so.  These concepts when they are broken down are nothing more than systems of control, control of the spirit in the case of religion for those who are inclined to those beliefs and control of the mind in the case of the judicial system for those who are inclined to the belief that it actually fulfils the purpose it is intended to fulfil.

The fact that you can see so many examples in your own life and the lives of the people around you that contradict this belief raises the question of why you should actually adhere to it at all.  More over it raises the question of what the outcome would be if that day of judgement ever came.  In the religious sense whilst it can often be the case that people ask who is going to Hell the real question to ask is who would actually get into Heaven if it existed.  There is a series on Netflix called The Good Place which explores this concept and brings into focus the weight of the decisions we make in life and their unforeseen ramifications ultimately leading to the question of accountability in ignorance.  The series is well worth a watch if you're interested in the concept, it also applies a recurring theme of a bureaucratic afterlife which is something I love to see in narrative fiction, TV Shows, and Movies like Beetlejuice.

In the judicial sense with a complete lack of trust in the existing system the only authority you can defer to is a hypothetical authority.  The only hypothetical authority that could exist in the confines of reality beyond a deity is any potential alien race that might discover our planet.  Whilst this is unlikely to ever happen it is an interesting thought experiment to ask, what conclusion would that race would draw if they were to stand in judgement of humanity as a whole, and if that judgement is not what we would prefer then what can you do to change it?

There's an episode of South Park called 'Pinewood Derby' [S13 E06] which revolves around this concept, I won't spoil the plot if you haven't seen it.  However the idea of having an objective third party that can stand in judgement is something that runs throughout society but like most things it is a theory that is arguably never achieved in practice because it is near impossible to implement. 

If you were asked to stand in judgement of humanity, where would you place the sum total of our entire history up until this point, with all we have achieved and all that we have done collectively, to the planet, to the animals and plants we share it with, and to one another.