“A man who judges himself superior, inferior, or even equal to another does not understand reality”

The expression “a man who judges himself superior, inferior, or even equal to another does not understand reality” is presented as a pinnacle of wisdom and as a challenge to the habit of measuring oneself against others. Its force lies in its refusal of every position on the scale: neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even equality, escapes the act of comparison. The book treats the thought not as an easy maxim but as a difficult discipline of perception, one that a lifetime may not suffice to absorb.

A counterpoint to hierarchy

The expression enters an argument about the evident inequalities of life: people differ in beauty, talent, and readiness for struggle. The extreme moral stance the narrator calls fascist accepts those inequalities as reality and rejects opposing accounts as pious falsehood or political correctness. Against that view, the narrator offers Christianity’s reversal of worldly rank, in which the littlest is the biggest, and the Buddhist teaching that refusing to rank oneself against another is a truer understanding of reality.

The saying is relayed through a Buddhist sutra that the narrator’s friend Hervé Clerc had first told him about. Its placement matters: it does not erase the reality of unequal circumstances, but questions the authority of the rankings people make from them. The alternative is not simply to declare everyone equal; the expression explicitly includes equality among the judgments that miss reality.

Ego, comparison, and moral distinctions

The narrator recognizes that the idea may make sense only within a doctrine that regards the ego as an illusion. Outside that framework, familiar counterexamples arise. The book invokes Mahatma Gandhi and the murderer John Wayne Gacy to show how readily people accept a hierarchy of moral worth, while also noting that criteria for ranking vary. Buddhist thought, as described here, does not require abandoning moral discernment: Buddhists insist on distinguishing the righteous from the depraved in conduct.

This qualification prevents the expression from becoming a claim that every action is morally equivalent. The distinction is between judging conduct and making the self’s comparative rank a measure of reality. The text holds both ideas in view: moral distinctions remain necessary, yet the impulse to decide whether one stands above, below, or level with another persists as a separate problem.

A difficult practice of attention

The narrator admits that he repeatedly makes such comparisons, more or less consciously, whenever he meets someone of his own kind. The imagined verdict brings either satisfaction or mortification, showing how the act of ranking binds self-image to other people. Eduard Limonov is associated with the same reflex: the comparison is not merely an abstract philosophical error but a habit that shapes how a person encounters a peer.

The expression therefore describes more than a conclusion to be accepted. The narrator says that one life is not enough to adopt, digest, and absorb the idea until it conditions perception and action at every moment. Its standard is practical and ongoing: wisdom would mean that the comparison no longer governs how one looks at others or behaves toward them.

The saying as a purpose of writing

The narrator returns to the expression as the book’s own ethical horizon. Writing the book is described as a strange way of attempting to take in this teaching, rather than proof that the attempt has succeeded. The phrase thus turns the act of writing into an exercise in confronting comparison: the narrative examines a life marked by judgments of rank while asking whether such judgments can ever cease to dictate a view of reality.