WHY PEOPLE HATE:
Does human's instinctual "Fear of the Unknown"
cause groups to define themselves
by hatred and exclusion?
Ethnocentricity, the cultural
bias in favor of one's own group, encourages social cohesion and tends
to foster contempt and occasional hatred towards others. People instinctually
fear the unknown, as depicted in my creative nonfiction narrative "The
Universal Publicist" when I used babble to fortify a language barrier
and protect me and my girl. When someone says "To change people's
minds, become one hundred percent like them and change them to your way
of thinking little by little" this reveals ethnocentricity, fear
of the unknown "other", tacit intolerance, and a personal reliance
on hypocrisy. Thus the human condition continues without improvement,
contaminated by ignorance, hostile emotions, rivalries, hatreds, abuse,
violence, and war.
The educated like to say Art imitates Life,
but only to those whose diligence on eclectic pursuits lead to self-actualization
with an inclusive system of values. D. W. Griffeth's Ku Klux Klan
movie The Birth of a Nation received condemnation after copycat behavior,
so he answered critics with his finest film, Intolerance, which depicts
intolerance's evils in four parallel stories.
The Enlightenment helped spell out basic Human
Rights; a right to self-expression, to think freely, to public expression
without censorship or fear of repression. This contrasts with institutionalized
intolerance; schoolyard and social cliques, Social Darwinists, segregated
ethnicities, authoritarian religions, socio-economic stratification, and
governments that vilify others and question the loyalties of dissenters. When
people see the hypocrisy of mere tolerance and truly accept each other
with respectful curiosity, it implies they want to educate themselves
into an universal value system based on greatest common good; to dispel
the illusion of the lowest form of commonness, Ethnocentricity, and search
for the Greatest Common Denominator, self-actualization to a humanity
respectful of each individual's moral and ethical uncertainty.
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