I’ve come to understand that, for the most part, we as humans are simply an amalgam of unconsciously acquired prejudices. Now, I realize that this is hardly a revolutionary revelation on the worldwide scale, but the implications of that realization are finally sinking in with me.
Most (not all, but the vast majority) of what we believe to be true is given to us by others rather than discovered on our own. Now this is hardly a bad thing; the ability to pass down masses of acquired knowledge is what has given us the advantage over other animals. The problem, then, is not the fact that we are taught these lessons, it is that we are taught them before we are able to sift for truth. We are not accepting a gift, but are being inoculated before accountability.
The fact of the matter is that we all have thousands of closely-held beliefs that are not only unchallenged, but unrecognized! Because of this, instead of going through life collecting experiences, then forming beliefs, we go through life filtering our experience to verify beliefs that we neither chose nor are aware of. These predispositions – held only by merit of being injected into us before our ability to recollect – shape our everyday interactions. In essence, we are on a plane where the auto-pilot was set before we were old enough to know where we wanted to go, and then we were led to believe that we are, in fact, the pilots.
Actually, that isn’t entirely accurate. Instead of there being one auto-pilot controlling the plane, there are several dozen, each programmed by a different person, and each with a different destination. At any given time, one has control, that there’s an endless power-struggle between them. We as the passenger are, of course, unaware of this, and continue to think that we are at the helm.
Don’t think that I’m asserting that our parents and communities are aspiring to brainwash us (although that is not outside the realm of acceptable practice). This is simply a natural consequence of living in a structured society. It is how the Code is taught to the young in order to help them function, but it is also the source of prejudice, racism, and widespread cognitive dissonance.
If you have the discipline and the inclination, try to challenge and justify some of your most fundamental assumptions. Is our cultural system of courtship and marriage better than arranged marriages (or even polygamy)? Is capitalism better than communism? Follow the example of children and, for every answer that you produce, respond to it with “why”. You’ll find that, eventually, your answers will stop being rational and will begin to boil down to gut feelings. The thing is, nine times out of ten, the gut is a creature of habit.
This kind of recognition-scrutiny cycle, applied to every one of our unrecognized assumptions, has been the creed of philosophers for millennia. We each need to take a Cartesian meditation and “unlearn what [we] have learned.” We need to take apart what we believe and intentionally re-form them, wherever this may lead us.