When Prejudice Benefits Everyone
Over the past few months a lot of news stories about horrific behavior have broken. Sexism and sexual harassment dominate the narrative. Prior to that we focused on LGBT rights, and before that, racism. As these terrible stories rotate through our news outlets, I cannot help but notice how absurd the discriminatory practices seem, and how swiftly society condemns behaviors that used to go unreported or ignored.
The past is host to discrimination based on irrelevant and uncontrollable things. Skin color, sexual orientation, and gender, have never and will never determine someone’s intelligence, work ethic, or ingenuity. A lot of people out there get that, and have adopted a wonderful culture of acceptance.
I would like to challenge that accepting attitude in one way, and urge everyone among us to consider adopting a new form of discrimination. Discrimination based on Darwinism.
What if discrimination turned away from things that people cannot control, and towards personal qualities that are within our control? What if we denounced the useless things about ourselves and celebrated the things that make us better human beings?
We could stigmatize laziness, bigotry, and self-pity. We could make sexual harassment such a horrific and repugnant thing that practicing it would no longer be worth the risk. The seeds are being planted now, and I believe it is time to channel societal pressure towards qualities that do not serve us. Hatred can be ok if it is well placed and used to eradicate ineffective and toxic behaviors.
If a person is born with all of their faculties about them, the road to success should be so clear, and so littered with stigmatized behaviors, that anyone who doesn’t follow the righteous path is completely ostracized. This may sound like and unattainable utopia, but given the strength and swiftness the digital age has afforded societal judgment, I think that a future in which we breed out bad behavior via social pressure is more feasible than it may seem.
Let’s turn the hostility around on the hateful people of this world, and make their behavior so abhorrent that is soon becomes a relic of the past.