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preserve their advantages, but there are long-term losses to such a system in the protection afforded the inept of the dominant race and the suppression of the gifted and able of other groups. The sad thing about the long history of racism is that it is an important issue only to and because of those determined to make it one. In almost all matters of public importance, if decisions could magically be made on the basis of relevant criteria, race would be one of the last considerations in any culture.
Beyond consideration of caste or race, differentiation of individuals is a given of the human condition. Those who are most skilled or who possess some admired attribute are treated as important or socially valuable and are granted a larger share of available economic, social and political rewards. This is discriminatory as well as universal in human culture. However, the cognitive basis for much social stupidity is not discrimination based on ability but the human tendency to generalize behavior of differentiated members of a group into the form of a representative stereotype. This streamlines social decisions, as individual variation can be ignored and reactions keyed to specific characteristics deemed definitive for behavioral interaction. However, the loss to stereotyping is obvious: individuals are raised up or put down not because of their abilities but because they are lumped into a particular cultural/linguistic category. Women, for example, have been universally and eternally victimized by stereotyping. It is alleged that the female psyche has somehow been permanently shaped by the oft noted ability of women to have children. It may well be that there is something to this for mothers (who do usually tend to be female) who spend more than 24 hours a day in the presence of children. Anyone subjected to such stress and pressure might have to sacrifice something to reality, and it may be a bit of logic and sanity. Recent research indicates there are real differences between male and female brains, so there may well be a special brand of feminine stupidity. However, before we venture too far into the yet unchartered domain of comparative idiocy, let us indulge in an uncharacteristic bit of diplomacy and allow the possibility that the two sexes are, in their own aggravating ways, equally stupid. Likewise, the down-trodden, the poor, the workers, all have been stereotypically regarded as social elements which somehow fail to fulfill the cultural ideal of success. At best, a culture will exploit those it has disenfranchised; at worst, it will ignore them. Throughout history, workers have been systematically fatigued, starved and forced to live in generally unhealthy conditions. Anyone trapped in such conditions might indeed be better off were he too dull to criticize his own lot: ergo the basic undercurrent of tragedy in the human drama—that those most directly and hardest hit by social iniquities are almost blessed if they can accept their
 stupidity.net 
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