The obnoxious is obnoxious because it is noxious ! Diksha Mataji (Gita Daily)

Based on Bhagavad Gita Chapter 16, Text 23

A prevailing intellectual fad sees all value-judgments as subjective: “If you think something is obnoxious, it is obnoxious for you — but not necessarily for me or anyone else.”

This subjectivity may be true for arbitrary value-judgments, but not for the Bhagavad-gita’s value-judgments because these are connected with real-life consequences.

Here’s an example to understand this. Alcoholics judge a bottle of alcohol as desirable; non-alcoholics, as undesirable. Are these judgments subjective? Not if we consider the real-life health consequences that beset alcoholics and bypass non-alcoholics.

Just as value-judgments are non-subjective in the area of physical health, Gita wisdom asserts that they are non-subjective in the area of spiritual health. We are all eternal blissful souls who are afflicted with the disease of misidentifying ourselves with material bodies that subject us to mortality and misery. By regaining our spiritual health, we end this misidentification and thereby the associated bodily suffering.