I asked Francisco to read over my last post, just to be sure i didnt inadvertently say something horribly ridiculous, and he gave me a number of thoughtful reflections:
Excerpts from the book Beyond Boundaries by John Townsend:
“Why do we generalize? There are two main reasons – for self-protection and to simplify complexity. People often generalize as a form of self-protection when boundaries are violated. They reason that if you swear off all members of a group representative of the person who hurt you, you are less likely to be hurt again. It’s rarely an intentional choice. It is a simple association that occurs in the more primitive part of our brains. We see someone similar to the negative person and our self-protective instincts tell us to move way.
We also generalize because it simplifies life decisions. You can write off a gender, a socioeconomic group, a religion or a personality style without having to take risk. Rather than entering into the due diligence of dealing with the complexities of who people are, the broad swipe becomes a black-and-white way of keeping matters easy to classify.”
