Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Why Charles Bukowski Hates Chicks

I just ran across the following Charles Bukowski quote:
"Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you."
It's absolutely true. But it's also true of men. This is really a human failing, not constrained to any one group. But we notice universal human failings more sharply in other groups/tribes.

Try something. Each time you hear someone negatively characterize a certain group of people, try to find the truth in it, and then add "...but It's really a human failing." You'll find that it nearly always applies.

Racism, sexism, classism, etc., are nothing more than the incomplete registration of a perfectly appropriate misanthropy.

4 comments:

sku said...

Great point! In addition, to also somewhat explain the phenomenon, there have been a number of psychological studies that show that people tend to remember things that reinforce their beliefs and stereotypes and forget the things that conflict. If a person thinks Asians are bad drivers, for instance, they are more likely to remember when they see a bad driver who is Asian (and add it to the catalog of things justifying that stereotype) than they are when they see a bad driver who is not Asian (and thus would conflict with their belief).

Jim Leff said...

Yup! Confirmation bias!

http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2010/11/confirmation-bias.html

sku said...

Ah, of course you've covered it already. I should have guessed :)

James Leff said...

If you'd assumed so, it'd have been confirmation bias. So good on you...

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