[Aristotle]
I've always wanted to open minds.
Perhaps to better the world. Perhaps to curse people with the selfsame introspection that haunts me.
Whatever my reasons, I hope this project helps my cause.
There was a time, a few years back, that I was sitting at a table in my apartment in Halifax, chatting with my friend Earl. We were probably playing Magic cards at the time, I can't remember it very clearly. I can't even remember exactly how the conversation went exactly. It's not the event that sticks clearly in my mind, you see, only the feeling, the sense of it. The subject of violence and crime in downtown Halifax came up, particularly in the Gottingen street area, a predominantly black neighbourhood. Halifax has a lot of racial tension and prejudice. A lot more than a lot of people there realize. A lot more than I knew at the time.
I said it was unfair to be racist and characterize blacks as criminal. I said that the situation in the neighbourhood was unrelated to the skin colour of the people living there. I suggested instead that it had to do with the economic situation there: a lot of low-rent housing and such.
Earl was never one to mince words much. He pounced on what I said, accusing me of being prejudiced against the poor, of blaming those with less money than I for the ills of society. It wasn't an angry argument, just a spirited debate between two good friends.
And I lost.
And I don't think either of us realized that day that he changed my life and my thinking forever. That didn't sink in for me until later.
Since that day I forever endeavour to open my mind farther, to remove as much prejudice as I can. I find it interesting to explore where my false notions lie, where the programming of my life experience needs correcting. In Taoism, it is suggested that to truly understand the world, we need not learn more, but rather that we must forget more: we must shed the false notions our limited experience of the world has given us, view it as if we'd never seen it before, in order to return to a truer understanding of what we encounter.
I think the human mind is like a relational database. In order to remember things, we build associations, create little "rules" in our minds. After a while, these rules become instinct. And once those rules are formed, even the largest exceptions cannot make us throw them away. We keep creating little patch updates to our software, but refuse to throw out the buggy code and go back to the design board. Personally, I have a few "bugs" that are definitely big enough that I should go back to the drawing board to redesign the rules. Unfortunately, with the human mind, that's incredibly hard to do.
Patrick F. Constantine: Version 29.1.5: Known Bug List
1. [Minor fault. Repeatable. Infrequent.] As much as I consciously view the races as equal but different, I find myself inherently more suspicious of black strangers when out in public. The second the instinct hits me, it is immediately followed now by a feeling of guilt, as I beat myself up over it and force myself to set it aside and judge all people as individuals. The fact that I've encountered more exceptions to this rule than actual proof has failed to alter the instinct that was programmed into me by the predominant racist ideas circulating throughout our society.
Future patch updates will continue to address this issue. Current workaround is getting to know people as individuals.
2. [Minor fault. Repeatable. Infrequent.] As much as I view the sexes as equal but different, my gut reactions to hearing of sexual histories differs for men and women. Hearing a man talk about a threesome with 2 women raises an instinctive "COOL!" in my mind, while hearing a woman tell me of being with 2 men raises an instinctive "SLUT!" It, too, is immediately followed by a brief feeling of guilt, as I force myself to set it aside as an antiquated and incorrect notion.
Future patch updates will continue to address this issue. Current workaround is getting to know people as individuals.
3. [Moderate fault. Repeatable. Occasional.] I mistake an inability to speak or write English clearly with an inability to think intelligently. And by "clearly" I mean from my point of view. Here in Newfoundland, Canada, there are basically two "types" of Newfoundlanders: "townies" (people from the city of St John's) like msyelf, and "baymen" (people from the smaller communities around the province). "Baymen tend to speak with an accent, sometimes a very thick, hard-to-understand accent. Whenever I hear such an accent, a part of my brain immediately thinks "Fuck, what an idiot. Where'd you learn to talk?"
Future patch updates will continue to address this issue. Current workaround is getting to know people as individuals.
4. [Moderate fault. Repeatable. Occassional.] I have a very difficult time respecting the intelligence of anyone who believes in a personified god. I consider the followers of most organized religions "sheep" who are either too lazy or simply unable to rationalize their own view of the world and whatever purpose it may have for them. It's an area in which I'm definitely very biased, and I wouldn't know how not to be, were I so inclined.
There are currently no plans to address this issue in future updates. Current workaround is getting to know people as individuals.
5. [**Major fault**. Repeatable. Frequent.] It's been said that Bobby Fischer was as good at chess as he was because he held the entire world in contempt, that he felt no one he ever met was as good a player as himself. I think sometimes that I'm like that. I'm intelligent. I'm very intelligent. I'm that type who walks into his high school final exam for advanced mathematics without having bothered to so much as crack a book to study, leaves after only an hour, and then shrugs when he finds out he scored 100%. And while sometimes I curse my overanalytical mind, particularly when I find my own feelings beneath my own mental microscope, I also revel in the feeling of power my intelligence brings. I consider myself smarter than almost everyone I've ever met. I consider very, very few my intellectual equals. And all that only amounts to pride or egotism if I just left it there, inside my own head. But I also have a sort of cut-off line in my mind, and I treat people differently when I perceive them as falling below that line. I show very little respect to people whose intelligence does not, in my opinion, reach that certain level.
While it might be desirable to address this issue in future updates, development simply doesn't know where to start. There are no known workarounds.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, for better or for worse, is how this product ships right now.
