Member-only story
Rejecting the worst idea humanity ever had.
Think about yourself. Are you ordinary, just a decent albeit flawed person? You are generally kind to people, but also lost in your own worries. You aren’t a saint, but you aren’t a Bond villain either.
Well, most people are generally kind. In that respect, you are quite ordinary. Certainly you have your unique qualities, skills, habits and inclinations. But overall, you are more good than bad. So is just about everyone. You aren’t an “other “— you are just a person.
Slicing, Dicing and Adding Warning Labels
But we slice people up into groups, don’t we? We divide them, and simplify them, and label them. Some of those groups come with warnings. Oh, those illegal aliens! Or black people. Or white people. People of varying kinds of sexuality. People from other countries.
There are people like you, and then there are others. Except, those others are very much like you.
After performing this operation, this separation of people from our common humanity, we confirm our own diagnosis — that THOSE people aren’t like us. They are “other.”
That’s where stereotypes come in. That’s where confirmation bias comes in. We look for examples that confirm our expectations, and we cling to them. They confirm what we (mistakenly) believe we know. Those examples help build up our world view. All of this gives us a model of how the world works, and how we can live in it. This makes life a little less confusing and less scary. But we are just lying to ourselves.
The Good, The Bad and The Reality
Those people who you think you understand, they are complex and have varied attitudes and behaviors. They have THEIR OWN biases — including biases about you — because they are human like you. We all tend to simplify to work out a way to live, and to engage with the world.
This isn’t inherently evil, but it causes problems if we take these biases too seriously, if we forget that it’s a quick and dirty simplification and NOT reality. We need to remember, perhaps even consciously remind ourselves, that other people are pretty much like us.
