"In one way traveling has narrowed my mind...

Started by offended by everything, July 01, 2017, 03:47:11 PM

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offended by everything

"What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.... Freud was brilliantly right when he wrote about 'the narcissism of the small difference': distinctions that seem trivial to the visitor are the obsessive concern of the local and the provincial minds... And when you hear the bigots talk about the 'other,' it's always in the same tones as their colonial bosses used to employ to talk about them. (Dirty, prone to crime, lazy, very untrustworthy with women and—this is especially toxic—inclined to breed rapidly.)"

Letters to a Young Contrarian

ZiggyStardust