Thought experiment #1: the “good man with bad qualities”

If I were to show you one black man who is perfect in every way, except that he sometimes struggles with lying, would you be comfortable with that picture?

Would it be acceptable to say, “This is a good man but he is a liar, which is a bad thing”? Would it be acceptable to describe him as a good man with bad qualities?

Would it be possible to condemn that bad quality without necessarily condemning the man?

I would imagine so.

Now, let’s say (for whatever reason), this same reality is true of all black men. That they are generally good people, except they lie sometimes. (In fact, this can be said to be true of not just all black men, but all other “groups”.)

Would you still be OK with condemning the bad quality, without condemning the group?

If not, why not?

What changes in the space between the individual and the group?

This conundrum reveals an inconsistency in how we treat an individual when we see them as a sole existence, and how we treat an individual when we see them as part of a group existence.

This is an important question because societies are made up of groups and groups are made up of people.

Groups are harder to control than individuals because they are less organised and more chaotic.

So, is it not illogical to hold groups to a more stringent (and harder to implement) existential code of conduct than we do individuals?

For example, if you were in a room with two black men, you would not expect them to think the same way, hold the same beliefs, share the same values and so on… just because they’re both black. In fact, the atmosphere would probably sour were you to suggest (face-to-face) that this should be the case.

Yet, in political discourse, we talk about things of which “men are guilty”, or “how women feel”, or “what trans people want”. Then we attempt to define how other groups should respond to these hive-mind based conjectures.

The nuance that exists when dealing with individuals becomes suffocated under the weight of conversations about groups.

While we’re willing to accept that all people are a mixture of good and bad—and that no person is born guilty—we abandon this nuance when dealing with groups.

Groups are unilaterally marked as bad (white people) or good (black people), and it is possible to be born into a “guilty” group.

This is a crude and heavy-handed mechanism.

My own experience tells me the thoughts, feelings and aspirations of white men, women or trans people are far from homogenous. And overlooking this fact is not only insulting, it’s counterproductive.

I know this not just from public discourse, but also from the private messages I receive—from *liberal* women, men and minorities (not alt-right racists)—who agree with the things I say but are too afraid to say them.

If this is how we begin conversations, communication is compromised at its inception.

I believe it was Thomas Sowell who said (paraphrasing), “If you can’t get two kids—who grew up in the same house, raised by the same parents, with the same level of economic opportunity—to be equal in outcomes and identical in outlook… how can you expect that of much larger and diverse groups of people?”

In the world of technology, this would be called an “unscalable model”. We want to apply a model to groups which hasn’t been proven to work on individuals.

And whenever people try to enforce an unscalable model, all they end up doing is scaling the pain.