Impartiality is Not Neutrality

Modern intellectual culture has made a virtue out of indecision.

We are told that the highest form of intelligence is to “sit on the fence,” to perpetually suspend judgment, to avoid commitment, to remain endlessly “balanced.” The contemporary academic, commentator, and institutional expert often presents himself as elevated precisely because he refuses to take sides.

But this is not impartiality. It is frequently fear disguised as sophistication.

According to Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, impartiality has almost nothing to do with neutrality in the modern sense. In fact, genuine impartiality inevitably leads to choice, discrimination, and ultimately the necessity of taking sides.

The subtitle of Gurdjieff’s great work is itself revealing: “An Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man.”

This is not the language of relativism. It is not therapeutic tolerance. It is certainly not the fashionable modern refusal to distinguish truth from falsehood, higher from lower, Being from sleep.

It is criticism.

And criticism presupposes discrimination.

For Gurdjieff, impartiality is the capacity to see reality objectively — free from vanity, collective hypnosis, emotional reactivity, ideological conditioning, and egoic self-interest. The ordinary human being cannot do this because he does not truly think. He merely reacts through mechanical associations, social programming, and fragmented impulses.

As Beelzebub explains, humanity lives under the tyranny of “suggestibility.” The modern person imagines himself independent while unconsciously absorbing the opinions, emotional tones, slogans, and moral assumptions of the surrounding environment. What passes for “thinking” is often nothing more than collective imitation.

This condition makes true impartiality impossible.

Why?

Because partiality does not primarily mean having convictions. Partiality means being unconsciously possessed by forces one does not perceive.

A man may loudly proclaim “neutrality” while being entirely enslaved to ideology, fear, institutional pressure, status anxiety, or collective fashion. Indeed, much contemporary neutrality is merely conformity without courage.

Gurdjieff’s understanding is radically different.

Impartiality is not the refusal to judge. It is the capacity to judge correctly.

And correct judgment inevitably produces differentiation.

The man who sees clearly does not remain indefinitely suspended between truth and falsehood, courage and cowardice, consciousness and sleep. Objective perception eventually demands alignment.

One must choose.

This is why the modern metaphor of “sitting on the fence” is spiritually disastrous. A fence is not a place of transcendence. It is often simply the avoidance of responsibility.

Reality itself is structured through distinctions:

• truth and illusion,

• consciousness and mechanicalness,

• essence and personality,

• Being and non-Being,

• creation and degeneration.

To perceive these distinctions impartially is not extremism. It is sanity.

In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, impartiality emerges only after long suffering, disciplined observation, and inner struggle. Beelzebub himself becomes capable of objective understanding not through passive detachment, but through painful confrontation with error and consequence.

This is profoundly important.

Modern culture imagines objectivity as emotional distance. Gurdjieff understood objectivity as transformed Being.

The impartial man is not cold. He is free.

Free from self-love.

Free from collective hypnosis.

Free from identification.

Free enough to see.

And because he sees, he can choose consciously.

This introduces one of the deepest implications of Gurdjieff’s teaching: impartiality is inseparable from free will.

A mechanical man cannot truly choose because he does not truly see. His “choices” are reactions produced by conditioning, appetite, fear, imitation, and unconscious association. He merely rationalizes after the fact what mechanical forces have already determined.

But objective seeing creates the possibility of conscious choice.

To see reality impartially is to stand momentarily outside the machinery of automatic reaction. It is to perceive competing forces without immediate identification. In that interval, genuine will becomes possible.

Yet once truth is seen, neutrality itself becomes impossible.

A man who perceives corruption cannot honestly call corruption virtue.

A man who perceives falsehood cannot indefinitely pretend falsehood and truth are equivalent.

A man who perceives degeneration cannot endlessly baptize it as “progress.”

Impartiality therefore does not abolish moral or spiritual distinction — it intensifies it.

The impartial man does not choose sides because of tribalism. He chooses because reality itself demands differentiation.

This is why Christ Himself repeatedly divides humanity into categories modern consciousness finds offensive:

• sheep and goats,

• narrow and broad ways,

• wheat and tares,

• sleep and wakefulness,

• life and death.

Modernity calls this “polarizing.”

Traditional spirituality called it discernment.

Gurdjieff’s work stands firmly in this older tradition. The aim is not ideological fanaticism, but awakened discrimination. One must become capable of seeing without distortion — and then acting in accordance with what one sees.

Thus impartiality is not passive neutrality. It is purified perception. And purified perception inevitably confronts man with responsibility.

In the end, the refusal to choose is itself a choice. One either sides with consciousness or mechanicalness. With truth or illusion. With Being or sleep.

The fence is never neutral territory. It merely conceals allegiance beneath the appearance of sophistication.