Pre-judice ...efficiency gone wrong - DRAFT
The world is complex, nuanced, contradictory, and often a barrel of gummy worms.
Is prejudice a lazy way to decide quicky, so you can move on to something …insignificant?
If you know everyone before you meet them, it saves you the time of having to meet them.
You already know. Of course, every one struggles to know themself and often pays a therapist to help them figure themself out, but ‘other people’ are in all CAPS and boldface font. We see you and we know ‘you.’
Zing, your life is a quantifiably simple thing to put into a ‘bin,’ and since it seems less valuable than many other people, we can not offer you our time and resources, or your duly deserved full humanity.
‘Efficiency’ is not a sacred absolute truth. Lying can be efficient. Dictators are or can be efficient? Democracies are inefficient?
Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev confessed that Joseph Stalin was efficiently a maximization of evil. Get rid of everyone and then you will have got rid of all problems? ‘Logic’ can be a scary road.
Groups are a quick way to use prejudice. Those ‘in the group’ get at least a preliminary pass. Those ‘outside the group’ are initially a ‘fail.’
We subgroup so we can screen for more things and pre-judge even more closely.
Anarchists create a group of one or none, so they don’t even need to judge, all is ‘fail’ from the start.
Yes, we do have to make judgments in life, but we often elevate laziness as a self-glorified use of efficiency.
Being social is taking the time to get to know people. It is an investment and is what constitutes living a life.
The experience of ‘getting to know’ is really the only thing that life is— what is this before me?, how does it connect with what I have experienced before?, and what does it mean to me?
We may not like all things equally, but we shouldn’t prejudge it before we even know what it is AND there are floors of dignity and respect that we must offer each ‘thing,’ especially humans. Even criminals are always human.
Skeptimism allows us to look thoroughly and intelligently. Claims do require evidence.
One of the biggest sins of human history was the subgrouping of some humans into categories that made them less than human. Even Stalin with all of his ‘evil’ was still fully human. He wasn’t evil (less than human), but instead was more accurately a really low manifestation of human empathy. It is the job of society to work hard to prevent its members from sinking so low in their own self views and in their behavior. Stalin was a failure of society to stop someone, from treating so many others as less than human.
Prejudice and paranoia can hinder us.