Beware of Willing Judges

October 14, 2026

A young woman comes out of a forest and says she heard something.

Perhaps she saw movement.

Perhaps something followed her.

Perhaps it was a wolf.

There is nothing especially difficult about any of those statements individually. The difficulty begins when somebody has to decide what they mean.

Bertolt Brecht, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, gives Azdak a warning about judgment:

Beware of willing Judges
For Truth is a black cat
In a windowless room at midnight
And Justice a blind bat.

The image is comic, but the problem isn't.

Truth is present. The cat is in the room.

The difficulty is seeing it.

Justice is moving too, but without reliable sight.

The dangerous person in Brecht's formulation is therefore not necessarily the corrupt judge or the dishonest judge.

It is the willing one.

The person ready to decide.

That distinction has been on my mind while working on The Girl Who Saw Wolves.

The story begins with uncertainty. Ilinca Mureșan, a young Romanian woman newly arrived in a Norwegian village, comes out of the forest frightened. Something happened there.

People quite reasonably want to know what.

Was there a wolf?

Maybe.

Did it follow her?

Possibly.

Did she see it?

She isn't sure.

Those answers are perfectly adequate until somebody has to do something.

A neighbor wants to protect her.

A villager tells another villager.

Someone responsible for public safety has to decide whether the possibility deserves attention.

Someone eventually has to write something down.

And writing something down is harder than it sounds.

A record dislikes hesitation.

“Woman heard something in forest” is accurate but almost useless.

“Possible wolf” is more useful.

“Possible wolf followed female from forest” is more useful still.

Nothing necessarily false has entered the account.

But its shape has changed.

The uncertainty has been organized.

Then the organized version begins producing consequences.

Perhaps men patrol the woods.

Perhaps children receive instructions.

Perhaps people begin checking on Ilinca.

Perhaps somebody thinks the experience must have been traumatic.

Each response is understandable.

Each response also makes the underlying story more substantial.

There is now a wolf patrol.

Surely somebody had reason to create a wolf patrol.

There are warnings.

Surely somebody had reason to issue warnings.

There is a record.

Surely whoever wrote the record knew what happened.

The action begins to authenticate the story that produced the action.

This is where the willing judge becomes interesting.

The judge needn't wear robes.

A willing judge can be anybody who believes uncertainty has lasted long enough.

Someone has to decide what happened.

Someone has to decide whether the danger is real.

Someone has to decide what should be done.

The impulse is not sinister.

Often it is responsible.

That is what makes it dangerous.

Brecht's Azdak is an odd figure to invoke in this context because he is hardly a model of judicial propriety. He is disorderly, compromised, comic, unpredictable. He does not possess the solemn confidence normally associated with justice.

And yet that lack of solemn certainty is part of what makes him useful.

He does not seem terribly impressed by the authority of authority.

He is capable of looking at the thing in front of him rather than merely honoring the category already assigned to it.

That is close to what the final lines of the passage suggest:

A third and shrugging party
Alone can right our wrong.

The shrug interests me.

Not because indifference is virtuous.

Because a shrug can mean:

I don't know.

And “I don't know” is one of the hardest answers for a functioning institution to tolerate.

An institution cannot patrol maybe.

It cannot easily counsel perhaps.

A form has to contain something.

A decision has to be made.

A category has to be selected.

The practical world requires action, and action often requires more certainty than experience provides.

That is not a criticism of institutions so much as a problem built into them.

A village that refuses to respond to a possible danger may be negligent.

A village that responds may help create a danger more definite than the evidence supports.

There is no clean position outside the problem.

Even Ilinca cannot solve it.

Suppose she later says:

That's not exactly what I meant.

I said I heard something.

I never said I saw the wolf clearly.

I don't know whether it followed me.

That should reduce the certainty.

Sometimes it does.

But once a stronger account exists, correction has to compete with it.

Perhaps she is minimizing what happened.

Perhaps she was clearer when the memory was fresh.

Perhaps she is embarrassed by the attention.

Perhaps she no longer wants people worrying about her.

Every one of those explanations is possible.

Which means the original story can survive the testimony of the person it is about.

At that point something peculiar has happened.

The story has acquired an existence independent of its source.

No liar was required.

No conspiracy was required.

No villain was required.

Only people trying to make sense of incomplete information.

That may be why Brecht's phrase “willing Judges” keeps returning to me.

The problem is not judgment itself.

Judgment is unavoidable.

The problem is the appetite for completion.

The wish to get from:

Something happened

to:

This is what happened

and then, almost without noticing the transition:

This is what must be done about what happened.

There may, of course, have been a wolf.

That possibility has to remain.

Otherwise the problem becomes trivial: foolish people frightened themselves over nothing.

But if there really might have been a wolf, everybody's behavior becomes harder to dismiss.

Concern becomes reasonable.

Precaution becomes reasonable.

Recording the incident becomes reasonable.

And still, somewhere inside all that reasonable behavior, uncertainty can disappear.

The black cat is still in the room.

The difficulty is that nobody can see it very well.

The blind bat continues flying.

And perhaps what is occasionally needed is not another person eager to settle the question, but someone willing to stand there for a moment, look into the darkness, and shrug.

Not because nothing matters.

Because maybe sometimes happens to be the truth.