Member-only story
It Is Harder To Hate What You Know
The unknown is easy to fill with outrage, easy to deform at will. It only takes knowing to see it for what it is, though.
One of the great achievements of the global world is that it is harder to imagine ourselves killing people we once had a beer with.
Generalisations are a necessary evil. We would go mad if we had to compute every instance of reality from scratch. It is a ridiculous idea: we can’t be expected to know the job of the person living behind the second door on the third floor in the building five blocks from us. We may know what each of our cousins does for a living but we couldn’t guess what they had for dinner last night. Yet, we can estimate what the main worries are for anybody in our neighbourhood, the same way anyone in the country can relate to a similar cultural background.
When we learn about a culture, we tend to learn from a template: things we should know about a culture we have an interest in. Someone chose the template, someone filled it in. The templates aren’t anywhere near perfect and at times their content couldn’t be further from reality. They still serve a purpose. Similar to generalisations, they are a necessary evil to function at some vague, macro level. Naturally, whatever expectations we may have about any individual…