I think it is part of our nature to classify and group the things we see everyday. Language is a great classification tool, and we group different animals, plants, people even, and absolutely everything we know. I know it is how we can settle ourselves, knowing that there is some kind of order in our chaotic society. But this caused unnecessay problems in the society when people are being classified according to physical characteristics and skin colour (so-called "race"), religion and many other personal features. Why is it that we have the natural tendency to classify things? Why does one thing have to be superior to another?
I think it is a learned response. From birth we are told what things are, and how to relate to them. As we get older we continue the trend. Sadly we end up missing out. Many self improvement disciplines focus on listening to you self-talk. You find you are reinforcing aspects of an item by its many definitions you've accepted as truth. Fire is hot,colorful, dangerous,chaotic,cool, symbolic, useful,etc. Now what if you've never needed fire and only learned a few 'truths' about it. Say, hot and dangerous, you would not turn to it as a tool, or a light. You simply would not see it. However, I think if a person were to learn fire is whatever you want it to be, all aspects of fire could be understood. Fire would be free of the constraints of the mind and use it as the moment dictated. As you say, Race is a victim of this learning. Stereotypes are not truths, but can be thought of as truth, deluding the mind and inhibiting the experience. Divide and conquer apply to words before they apply to nations. They are evil, therefore they are seperate and bad and they are not us. Fortunally, thoughts can be unlearned. Not to say that I hate adjectives and nouns, but words don't grasp the totallity of being.
I think that human nature does not exist. If it does exist, it is totally over-ridden by socialisation as a child. And more to the fact, i think its dangerous to claim there is an inherent human nature, becuase then people can claim they are superior from birth. We all remember nazi-psuedo science. So i just deny the entire thing mostly, and say that nurture triumphs over nature.
nature vs. nurture is a very hot topic in the modern society, I personally do believe nurture plays a more direct and significant effect on the person. However, we cannot deny the human nature, even though it can be shaped later. we can see the differences in our genes, but none of us is superior or inferior at birth, we are just different. Many experiments have been conducted proving the existence of human nature.
Read "Nature via Nurture" fantastic book! Anyways, I think only a portion of people classify and organize things into catagories. People who are more Math/Science learners would do this in everyday life. People who say are artistic would probably tend to be very visual and see things as single. Math/Science people and Artistic people are complete opposites.
that would be true if we had a crystal clear and certain definition of "superior" and "inferior" the concepts are subjective and relative
