{"id":4482,"date":"2013-09-14T00:05:02","date_gmt":"2013-09-14T07:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=4482"},"modified":"2013-09-13T14:34:49","modified_gmt":"2013-09-13T21:34:49","slug":"bigotrys-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2013\/09\/14\/bigotrys-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Bigotry’s Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you read about the girl, a year or two after the Columbine tragedy, who overheard a boy at lunch talking about his plans to shoot certain teachers and students? She reported what she had heard to the principal. After an investigation, the principal suspended the boy who had made the terrorist threats.<\/p>\n

\tThe boy then hired a lawyer who sued the girl for defamation of character. The case was subsequently thrown out, but not before her family had to spend thousands defending themselves against a stupid and frivolous lawsuit. We read such things and perhaps our first reaction is to mutter darkly, \u201ctypical lawyer\u201d or to tell the joke, \u201cWhat are three thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tIt has been said that stress is the confusion created when one\u2019s mind overrides the body\u2019s desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk who richly deserves it. Unfortunately, the all more likely consequence of facing jerks is for us to take the experience and make some wrongheaded and overly generalized conclusions out of it.<\/p>\n

\tIf a person of an ethnicity, profession, political party, or religion we have learned to despise does something jerklike we gleefully notice and record it as one more example, and additional, incontrovertible proof, of how bad that ethnicity, profession, party, or religion is. But what if a person who does not belong to the group we hate does the same sort of jerklike thing? What if the person who did it is part of our group? We hardly notice it, then. It makes no lasting impression. That person was just a jerk, we comment. We won\u2019t generalize it to cover all members of the species. We have explanations.<\/p>\n

And what if a member of the hated group does something remarkably unjerklike? What if, in fact, they do something that\u2019s actually noble? We shrug. We explain it away. We ignore it. More than likely, we won’t even notice it at all.<\/p>\n

The only thing that we\u2019ll notice is evidence that confirms <\/em>our hatred. We will see what fits our mindset and miss what doesn\u2019t. Every wrong done by the group we despise will enter our brains and take up permanent residence. (This is the same sort of thinking that leads to superstition. You tell me you know someone who broke a chain letter and they keeled over the next day Interesting, perhaps, but that someone died after breaking a chain letter does not prove any cause and effect relationship. It\u2019s like the old joke about the guy wearing garlic to keep the vampires away. \u201cHow silly\u201d, we say, but he points out that he hasn\u2019t been bothered by vampires in years.) <\/p>\n

If asked to justify our dislike of the group we despise (Republicans, Democrats, lawyers, Muslims, Christians) we\u2019ll easily and cheerfully list all their sins, never considering the obvious fact that given human nature, we could find bad things perpetrated by any group\u2019s collection of jerks that we\u2019d care to name. Even ours. Likewise, we\u2019ll choose not to consider all the good things we could list about a group we dislike. We’ll in fact strenuously argue that we’re right to despise [insert name here] and that there there are hardly any righteous or decent or intelligent ones out there and so we’re justified in our prejudice just because.<\/p>\n

\tThis is simple human nature. We tend to only notice information that meshes with what we already believe to be so. We are quick to believe bad things about our opponents, and slow to believe it about those we love. We are good at rationalization and justification and how it’s different about [insert name here]. We are skeptical of those we hate, credulous of those with whom we agree. We can call this the bigoted mindset. <\/p>\n

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Did you read about the girl, a year or two after the Columbine tragedy, who overheard a boy at lunch talking about his plans to shoot certain teachers and students? She reported what she had heard to the principal. After … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4484,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482\/revisions\/4484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}