I have a massive crush on humanity

This is an argument simultaneously in response to republicans, radical liberals, and radical feminists. It is not a very rational argument, but it is one of the principals by which I try to abide that has very little to do with rationality and utility but is really really important to me anyway.

Here are three arguments that I don't like:

1. Welfare is bad because there are a lot of people who take advantage of the system and abuse it. We shouldn't support those lazy people who just don't want to work.
2. (From my crazy leftist US gov teacher at De Anza): Society is falling apart and going to hell because of these evil evil republicans who want to keep women and minorities in a quasi-slavery position and because the socialization of our children today teaches them about violence and drugs and rape and not enough about love and family values.
3. Men (the “patriarchy”) are evil and trying to suppress women and want to rape them and deny them their rights. The media and makeup/clothing companies are evil and want to make women have Lots of Issues by making them insecure about their bodies to sell them products.

What is the common element? Quite simply, that people are evil. This is something we should always avoid thinking, because it mis-portrays our opponents. How do I know this? Tell me this: have you ever met someone who actually thought of themselves as evil? Someone saying to themselves “Mwahahaha, I am now going to oppress women for my own advantage”? No, I didn't think so. The point I'm going to make here is that your model of the world will be much better if you have a sense of charity to your political opponents; that you should remember to be optimistic about people because everyone (with the exception of psychopaths) is well-intentioned.

So first of all, let me destroy these above points one by one.

1. Do you know anyone who wants to live on food stamps? I don't. Standards of living are much better if you aren't on the US's pathetic version of welfare, and working is a fairly good predictor of happiness. As this Cracked.com article points out, misery is sort of humans' default setting, and working is one of the best ways to fix that. People on welfare are therefore probably pretty miserable and don't want to be in that situation. Furthermore, there are actual scientific studies that show the negligible percentage of “people who cheat the system” and how we spend way more money trying to find them than they would've taken away from the system in the first place. [Citation here]
2. ...I actually have nothing to say. This teacher's argument is so incoherent I don't even know where to start, except that it sounds roughly like the good old geezer's complaint “Kids these days! Society is falling apart because of video games!” which a few decades ago must have been “Kids these days! Hippies and pot will destroy society!” and a few decades before would've been “Them flappers and their bobs and pants will destroy society!” and a way long time ago must have been “Kids these days and their new hunting techniques with frigging bows and arrows must be making them lazy!” I have news for you, old geezer: society isn't falling apart. By many measures, it keeps getting awesomer.
3. I just don't think anyone planned for the oppression of women. Sure, the media has some negative effects. But do you really think that the people who design makeup commercials and put unrealistic plastic photoshop women on their ads were thinking “Haha, I will make women feel terrible about themselves!”? Personally, I think it's more likely that they were thinking “We are making a commercial for makeup. Therefore, it would make sense to have a really attractive woman in our commercial.”

I want to elaborate on this one a little bit, because this post was primarily inspired by the radical feminist blogs I've started reading. I just think they're doing it wrong, out of pure negativity. There is a recent internet buzz about Dove's Real Beauty campaign. Watch this video, but if you're too lazy it's a forensic artist who drew women based on their own descriptions of themselves and then on a stranger's description of themselves. I thought it was pretty powerful, and gives all of us hope that what we see in the mirror every day is not an accurate representation of what we look like to others. Our faults are magnified, and we should all break all of our mirrors remember that we're more beautiful than we think. Dove has a history of good feminist campaigns. I liked their last one even better: a time-elapse video showing how the women on makeup billboard ads get so beautiful and ending with “No wonder our perceptions of beauty are so distorted.”

Anyway, people on the internet immediately started making a huge fuss about the Real Beauty campaign because the women involved were primarily young-ish, thin-ish Caucasian women with blue eyes and blond hair. I definitely remember seeing a black woman on the video, but whatever. Details aren't important. I definitely remember seeing a woman who was about 40 on the video, too, but I guess that doesn't count either. The main point is that they're doing it wrong. They aren't giving Dove credit for what is a well-done campaign that is touching and empowering for a lot of women. So maybe if you, radical feminist, were on the design team, you would have included fatter, more diverse, older women. But does this neglect make it a bad campaign? Maybe I'm the only one not shocked by this because I too am a young Caucasian woman with blue eyes and blond hair. But I also don't think I would have noticed if it were all black women, or all Asian women, or all Latinas. I recently watched a different video on Youtube that was a short touching romantic film that had only Asian people and I literally didn't notice until I scrolled down and saw in the comments an exchange that went roughly like this: “Wow, Asians.” “But would anyone have said anything if it were all white people?”

I'm not trying to get all up on my high horse saying that I am above racism. I recently took a bunch of Implicit Association Tests which I recommend you do as well and it showed exactly what I would have predicted: I have little or no association with Asians as foreign or bad, and a strong automatic preference for whites over African-Americans. No, I wouldn't have predicted this because I'm secretly a horrible racist, but because in our scared little human brains, unknown is bad. Where I grew up in the Silicon Valley, I know just as many Asians and Indians as whites, and therefore I see them as just another brand of Californian, just as “ blond” and “brunette” might be two different brands of Californian. I don't look at Asian people and think “Hey look! An Asian!” because I am used to them and that would be ridiculous, like a New Yorker getting excited every time they see a Jew. However, there are very few black people where I grew up, and I'm pretty sure I've never had a close friend who was African-American. (I say African-American, not black, because I do know a Cameroonian who is one of my favorite people ever.) Just like how I disliked beautiful popular girls until I got to know some of them, I think my brain is normal to be suspicious of a group of people I haven't gotten to know.

However, it also is possible that these tests show nothing at all, because I just took the Gay-Straight test, where I honestly expected to get “slight automatic preference for gays over straights” and they gave me “strong automatic preference for straights over gays.” What? I am aware that my internal stereotype of gays is of kind, creative intellectuals who are awesome and share my political viewpoints, like a certain lit teacher at Homestead, or my history teacher now, or my friends from Campbell UCC, or any of my gay friends from, you know, everyday life. I know the “ I'm not racist, I'm friends with a black person!” claim gets shot down a lot, but let me just say I had no reason whatsoever to expect this result. So who knows what the IAT measures or whether it's accurate or whether it only works if you've drunk enough coffee in the morning and have fast reflexes and it's Tuesday.

The point is, I'm not above racism and I don't think anyone is. People have implicit preferences for people of their own race: “88% of white Americans (and 48% of black Americans!) show an implicit racial preference for whites on this test.” Clearly there is some weirdness going on here where everyone is secretly racist in the traditional sense of the word (against blacks), but it also shows that people just plain like their own people better. I think most people date within their broad racial/cultural spectrum (not sure if this just works on a white/black/Asian/Latino level or on a more specific Polish/American/Brazilian/Jewish sort of level). And this seems normal to me, pretty much like how I'd only date nerds because I'm a nerd and nerds understand each other.

That was a tangent. Sometimes I do tangents for an entire page or two and then realize that I'm not talking about the right topic. The thing I actually decided to write about was that a lot of the time, people make arguments (political or otherwise) that don't make sense simply because their enemies don't actually think that way. This is called strawmanning, and it is bad because it prevents people from rationally discussing issues to compare pros and cons and make decisions. When we aren't familiar with people, it's easy to assume that they're evil. This sort of ties in with racism: if you aren't familiar with a certain ethnic group, you probably don't actively think “Black people are horrible!” but subconsciously you might trust them less. It's very easy for me to assume that pro-lifers are horrible, misogynistic people without remembering that they actually believe that a fetus is as important and valuable as the mother (often more so, because the fetus hasn't sinned yet) and therefore it would be murder to abort. Everyone is the hero of their own story. No one plays the evil villain, except mentally ill people. And whether or not they are wrong, it works much better to treat them like the well-intentioned people they are.

I was inspired to write this post partly by watching youtube videos of this CMU a capella group my best friend sent me. Watching it just gives me the feels, this wonderful feeling that humanity is just awesome and that there are so many beautiful, kind, quirky, special, intelligent, fascinating individuals out there to discover and I can't wait to meet as many of them as I can. This is an odd feeling for me: I am an introvert and meeting people terrifies me. I have a lot less social anxiety than I used to, but it's still stressful to be among people.

Still, I get this feeling fairly often. Theater and music both give me the feels, and even when I've been in the pit orchestra for musicals, I never dare to talk to the actors because I don't want to destroy the perfect image I have of them. I've done HMS Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, and South Pacific. Every single time we in the pit romanticize the actors and talk about them, without ever daring to talk to them. It is easier to have heroes when you don't know too much about someone. I idolize Gustavo Dudamel, and I know nothing about him other than what orchestras he conducts, and Danzon no 2. Just look at that smile, that fervor! Tumblr is a great example as well: they know quite well what unreasonable infatuations are. They are obsessed with Benedict Cumberbatch/Sherlock Holmes. They are obsessed with David Tennant/Doctor Who. They are obsessed with lots of beautiful and creative people, and you know why? Because people can actually be really cool. Granted, sometimes when we get to know them they aren't as perfect as we hoped they would be, but sometimes they're really really cool anyway and sometimes they're even cooler than we could've imagined. People are fascinating and complex and beautiful and they're what I want to study in college. Everything we do revolves around people, and generally if we feel like we have no one, if we feel alone, we're pretty depressed creatures. People are what makes us laugh, and cry, and love, and everything else that we obsess about and write poems about and live for.

So the flaw in these arguments about welfare and the patriarchy and all that is that these people are forgetting the humanity of their enemies, and they're confusing the issue by misrepresenting their opponents. People aren't trying to be evil, I promise. The patriarchy, if you insist on using the term, is not a club of straight white males who are trying to suppress your liberties. The patriarchy is a system of cultural traditions and norms that need to be overthrown because times are changing. A lot of the enemies of change (those who oppose subsidized birth control and abortions and gay marriage and all that jazz) are exactly that: people who have trouble with the notion of change because they were quite comfortable with the world in its previous state, having never felt disadvantaged by it themselves. They have reasons to oppose it, but a lot of it is just being conservative, which means reluctant to change the system, and with not being gay/female/an immigrant themselves.

I know quite a few people who are homophobic, but they know just one or two gays and insist that these gays are not like the rest of these (sick, perverted, drag queen, whatever their stereotype is) gays. One of them sent me a chain email with a picture of two fat men walking hand in hand in a gay pride parade, wearing pink high heels and thongs and nothing else. The caption was “And we'd let these people adopt children?” And suddenly I understood. He doesn't like gays because he doesn't know enough of them. He knows one or two, thinks they fall outside the norm, and thinks that the norm is the flamboyant cross-dressers in gay pride parades. With so little information, it doesn't seem surprising that he would conclude that gays are just really kinky people who probably shouldn't be trusted with children. (Sorry, trans people who are excluded by LGB media because you're too weird and we're trying to emphasis the normality of many gay couples! But... one step at a time, ok?) So when he says he's against gay marriage, it's not against my gay friends or my awesome history teacher. It's against “those people” because he's taken away their humanity. Just like how I often take away the humanity of pro-lifers before I remember that they, too, are in fact well-intentioned. So whenever you find yourself hating a particular group, try to imagine yourself what their rationales might be. Try to remember that they could be your parents, or your “That's my uncle Bob – he has some weird political opinions so don't get him started on communism, but he's really cool! He taught me how to hunt squirrels!” Try to imagine the little quirks about them that would make you like them. Maybe they hum off-key all the time and it's simultaneously annoying and endearing. Maybe they are gluttons for chocolate. Think about what they ate for breakfast, and whether they are a cat person or a dog person. Think about the things that make them human, the things that make them awesome, and remember that no one is evil. Some people are wrong, but no one is evil.