Amerika

Some day, someone will tote up the totals spent on trying to scientifically manage and socially engineer humanity and realize that we spent our technological windfall entirely on trying to control each other. It will be a grim day the instant someone mentions what else we could have had for that pricetag.

No greater amount within that excess will have been spent that the money designed to make us stop being “racist,” despite the known fact that humans seem to hate each other in groups on many levels — caste, race, class, ethnicity, religion, culture, region — and this has not changed since the dawn of time, nor is it illogical.

It turns out that we use stereotypes because they are accurate:

Our evolutionary ancestors were often called to act fast, on partial information from a small sample, in novel or risky situations. Under those conditions, the ability to form a better-than-chance prediction is an advantage. Our brain constructs general categories from which it derives predictions about category-relevant specific, and novel, situations. That trick has served us well enough to be selected into our brain’s basic repertoire. Wherever humans live, so do stereotypes.

If you want to know the risk from some category of humans, stereotypes work. They are not precise; you cannot say that a certain member of a certain group will behave in specific ways, but you can say that he or she is more likely to do so to the point that you best stay hidden in the woods rather than risk the confrontation.

This extends to noticing things about other groups, something that the happiest nations seem to do privately but consistently:

The Nordic countries are well known for topping charts globally in education, equality, and happiness levels. Nordic welfare systems provide citizens with myriad state benefits and free healthcare and education from pre-school to university. However, in The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights’ “Being Black in the EU” study, Finland has also topped the charts for something far more insidious as well: racism.

Based on the study made in 2018, 63 percent of people of African descent in Finland have experienced racially motivated harassment, compared to a group average of 30 percent in the 12 European Union states surveyed. In both Denmark and Sweden, the number was 41 percent.

A study shows that in Finland views on immigration have become less tolerant in the past five years. In 2015, 65 percent of the Finnish population strongly disagreed with the statement that the “white European race must be prevented from mixing into darker races because otherwise, the European autochthonous population will go extinct”, but in 2020 the number had decreased to 56.

Even more, the inhabitants of these happiest nations tend to act against the stereotyped groups that they find most likely to cause problems:

There were some 1,165 complaints made about suspected hate crimes across the country in 2017, according to statistics compiled by Finland’s police academy, which is an eight percent increase compared to the previous year. While there were more recorded incidents last year, the number was still somewhat less than the peak recorded in 2015 when more than 32,000 asylum seekers arrived in Finland.

The study also found that the majority of victims of violence (61%) did not know the perpetrators but generally identified them as not having minority backgrounds.

Thirty eight percent of the victims of violence identified their assailants as members of a minority ethnic background other than their own.

Perhaps happiness correlates with realism, and recognizing that both stereotypes and xenophobia are survival strategies. Casting aside the neurotic fear of those allows people to live in a world where every part makes sense, instead of wandering in the murky labyrinths of neurosis based in ideology.

Tags: finland, racism, stereotype accuracy