How Does Prejudice Begin?
There is No Justice in History - Ch.8
Why have men always dominated across homo-sapiens societies?
Why does racism exist?
Why is a weak old man in charge of a massive militaries of younger stronger people?
An even better question is,
“how did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks?
The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts.” (Sapiens, 149)
Every single time that humans have organized into large groups, we’ve needed imagined orders. These are usually ingrained as class systems and hierarchies.
We assign groups of people specific titles and that determines their rights and their relation to other people. Examples of this are the caste system in India. When invaders too over 3000 years ago, they grew weary of their position in the growing society. In response, they assigned people to groups and made each group’s place and role in society rigid and clear. They divided their people to become less outnumbered.
How did they convince people to follow these rules?
They used the same tactics as Hammurabi and Thomas Jefferson - they invoked myths to imply the imagined order is natural.
Hammurabi said his laws were spoken by the gods to him. The American Declaration of Independence speaks of god-given rights.
There are similar myths across all societies on all parts of the globe. They’re necessary to convince the people who get the short end of the stick that their situation is natural and unavoidable, not fictional and flexible.
If myths and hierarchies are common across the world, why do some groups discriminate by skin color and others by religion? How is the imagined order created?
Usually it’s an accidental historical incident and many years of reinforcing troubles that determines the order. For example, when African-American slaves were freed, they faced horrible racism.
Even when given the legal right to have any jobs, and go to any schools, the racism continued. In fact, socially, it got worse because it created a reinforcing cycle. They were legally allowed to get the jobs but the people in charge wouldn’t hire them. Then people began to think, well they must be lazy if they aren’t working these jobs they’re legally allowed to do. What started as discrimination based on myths became discrimination based on illogical anecdotes and skewed statistics.
The imagined order can subtly skew reality and, if ignored, will cause a vicious cycle of discrimination. Look at any major civilization in history.
Ask who was at the bottom of their hierarchy, and you will find descendants of that civilization today who have all new “rational” reasons to dislike those same people.
Question of The Day
Do you think it’s possible to create a large cooperative group with no hierarchy or discrimination? How?
Your Biggest Fan,
Noah “BigNerd” Sochaczevski