Shout At The Devil

Just saw this comic in the Sun­day paper, and I thought I’d share it with every­one -

As usual, Pig makes a good point and teaches us a valu­able les­son. Lately I’ve been hear­ing a lot about how cer­tain parts of our soci­ety (which seg­ments are in ques­tion dif­fer depend­ing who you’re talk­ing with, of course) are stu­pid or insane or evil, and that we should get rid of them, silence them, or kill them. But as Pig says, peo­ple are just peo­ple. They aren’t evil, they just have dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties. As George Will pointed out in a recent episode of Col­bert Report, con­ser­v­a­tives and lib­er­als both value free­dom and equal­ity, but when those two val­ues con­flict, con­ser­v­a­tives think free­dom is more impor­tant, whereas lib­er­als think equal­ity is.

We are all, myself included, occa­sion­ally guilty of the fun­da­men­tal attri­bu­tional bias, where we see some­one act in a cer­tain way, and assume that the per­son is good, evil, smart, stu­pid, or what­ever. We don’t stop and think about the sit­u­a­tional fac­tors that led to that action, or see the person’s inner tur­moil as he went through the decision-​making process. This bias, par­tic­u­larly when com­bined with hos­tile attri­bu­tional bias, a ten­dency to inter­pret ambigu­ous but neg­a­tive actions from oth­ers as delib­er­ately hos­tile actions instead of as acci­dents or oth­er­wise, can lead to mak­ing very poor deci­sions of our own.

We need to be aware of these biases, and real­ize that label­ing peo­ple as “stu­pid” “insane” “evil” “ene­mies” mar­gin­al­izes and dehu­man­izes oth­ers, and it polar­izes the world, mak­ing our prob­lems that much worse, since we are unable to come together to find solu­tions that work for everyone.

Tags: Dinhternet, Work