Showing posts with label stereotype. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stereotype. Show all posts

Friday, October 25, 2013

Overgeneralizing

I chose that title instead of demonizing or stereotyping or scapegoating, but they are all getting at the same basic human impulse. I really liked how this recent comment stated it, in response to this assertion: "People’s memory is the biggest resource towards learning and avoiding people that will hurt them again":

No two people are exactly alike, but we all share common traits. You've learned to identify and avoid the people who have hurt you, and that is good. However, that memory only relates to the specific people who have harmed you. Expanding that experience to cover large groups of mostly unrelated people will lead to racism, scapegoating, and stereotyping. That makes you the aggressor and them your victims, and you'll find that the people you harm will learn to avoid you as well. 

The rest of the comment is also interesting:

You didn't seem to catch this, but "The one thing I know is we are constantly being born" is a metaphor. My interpretation is that we are always facing new circumstances, and in facing them we enter a new world every day.

Animals are capable of learning, especially when the stimuli are rewards and pain. Animals live in the wild, hunting or foraging, searching for mates, bearing and caring for offspring. If their offspring survive to become self-sufficient, then they have lived full lives. The gift of intelligence merely allows people to be alive without living, doing none of the things they were born to do.

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