Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my resistance to identify as a part of any particular group. This isn’t just strictly to piss off a society. It’s a maneuver that allows me to avoid people who use those identifications as a means of ultimately dismissing anything you say.
This is why I’m an enormous fan of doing away with political party and religious identifications. Listen, I don’t care if you’re mormon, jewish, muslim, or hindu – I’m going to be judging you based on your actions. You could go to church every Sunday, and if you act like a complete douchebag, the only thing that matters to me is that fact – not whether I’ll see you in heaven (looking up from hell).
But I have the luxury of viewing the world that way because I don’t partake in dogma that insists that I group the world into people who believe what I believe and people who are going to hell/are ruining this country based only on their religious or political identifications.
I think we all should take part in this way of viewing the world. I don’t think this because I want everyone to agree with me, but because I want everyone to feel free to disagree with me. I want everyone to know that even if I don’t believe in god, I respect their beliefs and I understand those beliefs guide them. I also think people need to keep in mind that even if someone has the same beliefs they have, they might be guided in a different way. You don’t want to be judged with everyone who has the same beliefs. I might not believe in god, but I don’t approve of atheists with no respect or real interest in the role religion plays in people’s lives or in society. And I don’t want to be judged with those people.
I think if we viewed the world this way, we would be forced to state our actual beliefs, not just some stupid argument for our side. It would make conflict clearer and easier to understand, even if we couldn’t reach an agreement. And it would make it hard to make personal attacks on someone just because of their beliefs. We would have to think of people as, well, people. And I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be viewed as a person. So I choose to try to view other people the same.
It seems to me that feeding into conflict by emphasizing surface differences such as religious or political identifications is a practice that will come back to bite us all in the butt. I understand that the groups you belong to reflect your beliefs, but instead of discussing your group with me, why don’t you discuss your personal beliefs?
K.
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But surely the bandwagon effect isn’t limited to the present time.
Throughout history, the vast majority of people have been thoughtless, selfish, bigoted and short-sighted — people who are not intelligent enough to think critically, and thus require the use of labels to understand viewpoints different from their own. The nations that have prospered have done so under the dictatorial rule of one insightful and intelligent person, or a small group or succession of such people. See the Roman empire, the British empire, the leaders of the French and American revolutions, etc., etc. Eventually those people die and we are left with the “idiocracy” we have today.
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