Imagine someone really good and someone really awful are standing in front of you. Go ahead. Make a value judgement. For this purpose, it doesn't matter who's reallygood or bad - just who you thinkis. Pick your own candidates - perhaps Hitler and Gandhi.
Suppose you ask them a question, and they both tell you something different. (That really wouldn't be too surprising...) Which one would you be inclined to believe?
Now, suppose, instead, you had an artist and a lawyer standing in front of you, in the same situation. Now who do you believe? Most likely, you'd believe the artist, since lawyers are just about the bottom of the trust totem pole.
Now, suppose that it turns out that the question was something about art. It just so happens that Hitler was actually a trained artist. Gandhi was a lawyer. (At least that's what I learned in the movie Gandhi.) It's very possible that Hitler would be the one with the right answer.
This sounds farfetched. Hey, I stacked the deck to make Hitler more believeable than Gandhi! But, how often do you automaticallydiscount something someone says, just because they're a jerk? Just because you happen to disagree with someome violently about one thing, how much less likely are you to believe them about something else?
I'm afraid I do this all the time. In an effort to restrict the seemingly endless flow of information into my head, I tend to divide the world into the group of people I like or agree with on some topic, and the other people I don't like or disagree with on something, and then tune out those other people.
I know that makes my choices weaker since I base them on an arbitrarily smaller cache of information. But I'll be darned if I can figure out a way to open my brain to everything that comes out of the mouth of every jerk I hear. I'll keep trying.
Our culture has such an obsession with the good guysand the bad guysthat it's very easy to forget that totally good and totally bad people only exist in fiction. Oh, and in our entertainment. Oh, and in our news stories. Oh, and in our politics, at least as they are portrayed in the media. Especially our international politics! During the cold war, it was almost unthinkable that the Russians were really people. They had to be some kind of demons, satanic forces without anytruth in them at all. Because, if they did, then how would you know when you could trust them and when you couldn't? How could you aim tens of thousands of atomic warheads at them? Better to just assume they are always evil and dishonest. Easier that way.
The more compassionate among us used to say,"Well, it isn't the Russian people - it's just their leaders who are demonsand devils."
This mapping of absolute good and evil onto the faces of people we like or don't like is almost a prerequisite for taking a gun out and mowing down a bunch 'o folks. If there's a chance that a bit of good is in someone you don't like, well, perhaps you'd be tempted to leave the bullets at home.
Our necessity to demonize one side and sanctify the other in international conflicts in order to appear decisive and not waffling when we launch the bombers or overthrow governments may have led us to do some things we may yet live to regret.
In a way, this is reminiscent of the philosophy of "the medium is the message." Sometimes the person or source of information so offends you that you miss the message. We tend to believe the con man who has charisma and charm, and ignore the homeless man who may have considerable wisdom but be down on his luck.
In a similar way, as a culture, we trust and respect the lucky and the rich and the powerful, even if they're vicious and boorish, and we generally ignore, and frequently act as though we despise, the poor. Even when we know the rich and powerful are taking us to the cleaners, we laugh and go along with it, because, well, they're rich and powerful.
"A rising tide lifts all ships"
"What's good for the rich (or General Motors, or Microsoft, or Donald Trump) is good for America."
Does this sound familiar?
