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September
Stereotypes, our best friends and our worst
enemies.
In the panic for security now gripping the USA,
typing and profiling others has become as
commonplace as it is noxious.
Stereotypes are both our best friends and our
worst enemies. Imagine your mind as the stereo
playback of your computer. Stereotypes are the
tracks that are running on the vast iPod of life.
This goes for everything in life,though we tend to
think of stereotypes about people when we use the
word. For example, I see heavy black clouds and my
stereotype says “rain” and I go for my
umbrella or raincoat before leaving the house.
Generalizations (statistically probable data)
about a culture (a group of people who develop
ideas and approaches to life or a part of life in
common) can give us a high probability that many
people in that group will act, think, speak or
behave in a certain way—but there is no
certainty that the person before me who belongs to
this group will do so.
“Stereotypes” is the common word for
these functional generalizations. They are anchors
for our thinking, one of our necessary mental
processes. We have an immediate interpretive
reaction for everything we see, hear or experience
(at least those things for which biology and
culture have trained our senses to register rather
than ignore). New data is interpreted by what we
have learned or previously experienced individually
or collectively.
What we do next, however, is critical. WE CHECK
THE REALITY AGAINST THE STEREOTYPE (this by the way
refines the stereotype for its next use). We
explore alternative interpretations, possiblities;
use other stereotypes to question the ones that
have arisen. We say of the dark clouds, “Maybe
it will pass over.” But we have our rain gear
ready in case it pours down cats and dogs, needles,
or sheets or whatever cultural equivalent of
abundant wet.
Stereotypes are the necessary mental/emotional
chatter that we constantly are engaged in during
our waking hours at least. If you don’t
believe me, just pause for a moment to be aware of
the THINGS YOU HAVE SAID TO YOURSELF OR INTERNALLY
PRESENTED TO YOUR SELF (images, sounds, memories,
judgements----have you heard yourself say
“yesssssssss!” or “BS!”, etc.,
etc.?) about the couple of paragraphs you have just
read, and, perhaps about their author (I don’t
wanna’ know).
Whether you choose to share it or not, you have
an opinion about everything; it’s always there
if you care to listen in. Cognitive scientists,
those people who study how the mind works, tell us
that in listening to someone else, we are talking
to ourselves about eight times as fast to figure
out what is being said.
This, by the way, is how listening works. Good
listening is selecting the right chatter track to
run, not not reacting at all. The faster and more
accurately we can unconsciously talk to ourselves
about what is going on around us, its possiblities,
its consequences, possible options, before we
invest in one interpretation or an other, the
better we listen.
Stereotypes are unitary elements in our
listening, parts the running internal (cultural)
interpretative dialogue that keeps us from having
to figure life out at every second, which we are
ever trying to do at the unconscious (thank God!)
level. Well functioning mental wetware is forever
challenging each bit of information it receives
for:
- is it true or false, right or wrong?
- is it good or bad (safe or dangerous)?
- is it ugly or beautiful (how the stereotypes
on this one change from culture to culture and
fashion season to fashion season.
- is it one or many? (Is this strange
arrangement of sticks a “chair”?)
We are talking this out internally all the time,
before, during, and after taking decisions and
acting.
Stereotypes are our friends. As long as we treat
them like good friends, sit with them, ask them
questions and try to find out what they mean when
they say something, and hold their hands when it is
pretty clear that we haven’t sorted something
out yet.
That being said, this process is also an enemy,
because we sometimes need to be alone, give it a
rest, veg out, change the mental track that is
playing by doing something different, singing,
meditating, seeing a movie, making love. Playing
the same track over and over and over and over
leads to deadly certainty, inflexible
fundamentalism. It is a march that promises and
sometimes goose-steps its way power and glory and
ultimately leads to cultural implosion and
oblivion. Gross stereotypes about others (ethnic,
racial, gender, age, etc.) can become self
reinforcing systems, usually maintained in society
for someone’s benefit and to someone’s
loss. If we cannot change people’s minds we
change the laws when these become too ominous.
This dynamic is why diversity is not just a
fact, but a necessity for survival, and why making
a monoculture out of our internal or external
ecosystem, making a one-party system or a
dictatorship of a government leads to great
fortunes, empires and death, the death of a culture
and usually the deaths of many of its people and of
those around them. Eliminate diversity and you win
big…for a while. Cultivate diversity, expand
inclusion and we can all win bigger… if only
it were not for the diversity of those who want to
eliminate diversity… In dealing with life and
especially in dealing with culture, we need to
continually cultivate what Zen calls
“beginners mind” and management
consultants call “thinking out of the
box.” We need a constant process of
questioning the presumptions/stereotypes by which
we necessarily operate on a day to day basis to
discover and benefit from more possibilities.
Why, because some tracks like to take over. We
empower them because we feel they will serve or
save us. Sometimes people want their track to
dominate in our selection of mental tracks that we
play on our mental iPod (dogma). Some people are
professionals at this (or use professionals) to
ensure this, e.g., advertisers, politicians,
anybody with a stake in something. They repeat
things over and over until they are embedded in our
operating systems.
This is never more true than when we are
stressed, fearful or panicked. Old generalizations
become certainties in our minds and get acted out
in our behavior toward each other. They get more
and more deeply rooted and harder to resist. They
turn into thousand year old hatreds. Animosities we
found inexplicable in the Balkans a decade ago as
Usians—why can’t these people get
along?!—we are now acting out with much of the
Islamic world. We are making the world into a very
large Balkans.
If anyone thinks the next election will be
decided by the issues… Not a chance! There is
a great struggle going on at the moment to embed
the “right” stereotypes in voters’
minds, by making appeals to stereotypes they always
have running. What Goebbels and Leni Reisenthal
knew intuitively when they built Hitler’s
propaganda machine, research offers today to all
who will learn, and advertisers and political
parties have learned. They know where the money and
the power are at.
Yup, forget the issues. We don’t have time
for them. Go for sound bites, memes, those
contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our
mind in a kind of Darwinian selection. If we can
successfully stereotype the opposition, we can win.
Seen in this light, it is not surprising that a
month should have gone by when the military records
of three decades ago are the main electorial
prooccupation.
We are told that most of the undecided voters
are not trying to resolve their indecision by
studying the candidates and the issues, but that
they will make up their mind on “how they feel
about the candidates” on election day. They
are taking their cues from entertainment media that
appeal to them. If this is so, it is the end of
democracy when those who don’t know and
don’t want to know will decide for us which
way things go.
© 2008 George
Simons
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There are no elements so diverse that they cannot
be joined in the heart of a man. - Jean
Giraudoux
George Simons
is a US specialist in intercultural and gender
communication who hangs out in Mandelieu - la
Napoule, France, as well as in Santa Cruz, CA. In
the 1980’s he was one of the founders of the
Hidden Valley Center for Men and the Cyberguys
network. He is currently the treasurer on the board
of The National Men's Resource Center™. He is
on the faculty of Management Centre Europe, where
he consults on virtual global teamwork. He has
written over a dozen books on culture and gender
including Working
Together: How to Become More Effective
in a Multicultural
Organization and
with Deborah G. Weissman, Men
& Women: Partners at
Work. (Crisp
Foundation) and is the creator of the award-winning
Diversophy® game. www.diversophy.com
or E-Mail.
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