2/ For the sake of our own sanity, we often treat observable singular expressions as equivalent to someone's isolated and immutable beliefs. That's a problem because it's only an ephemeral sample... ...and isolated beliefs are at best quantitatively convenient abstractions.
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3/ What people say and what people do or would do are different things. We understand that for the positive case readily. That is, someone says they'd do something that they represent as morally correct, but then they'd go right ahead and do the other thing.
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4/ But, it's also true that people are prone to saying horrible things about strangers and strangers belonging to their out-groups, yet they would act differently -- more positively -- confronted with the reality of something unjust.
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5/ None of this is to say the world isn't filled with a lot of genuinely shit people. Or even that many if not most of them won't live out their lives as such. But, the amount of time we spend developing heuristics over abstractions is one of the replicating factors.
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6/ And, I don't want to replicate it -- I want to leave this world having good reason to believe I made it a better place! And, at this point that means recognizing how neither crude social hammers or advanced cybernetic systems are sufficient.
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7/ Of course, technology creates shocks that change the world. Obvious ones that produce waves so big it's impossible to see them as anything but singular cause. But people matter, too.
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8/ And, at least for someone *in my position*, I think helping and inviting people to change -- people who I do often viscerally hate because of my informed and experiential expectations about how they would act -- isn't something I can neglect. Obviously, it's hard.
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9/ Animosity over abstractions is partly social defense. Our brains don't really allow us to empathize without concomitant changes to our beliefs. Or at least the risk of it. So we reject them, what they believe, and correlates to who they are en masse for fear of contamination.
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10/ But, the limit of that behavior is what we're rapidly approaching. Beliefs and trust easily partitioned by accessible stereotypes coupled with socio-political processes that make reconciliation increasingly unlikely and, with more time, intractable by any palatable means.
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11/ Long story short: - Mind your allies; - Attend to pressing threats; - But, don't forget to build *some* bridges, too.
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