The other day, Smallsteps and I were talking about some math things and I mentioned the halving paradox, where continually halving the distance will never reach zero. While this works in theory, in practice, this isn't the case because whatever is making the journey, has a thickness too, meaning that at some point, the thickness of the movement is wider than the space left to move. You can keep halving the distance to the wall, but eventually your nose is going to touch the wall.
However in a discussion with a friend today about racism, I used the same paradox to explain one of the problems we face in the world, where things keep getting worse, even as things get better. In regards to racism for instance, the average black person in the US today doesn't face anywhere near the level of racism their parents or grandparents faced. Things have got better. For ease of using the analogy, lets say that every generation or so the level of racism halved, meaning that a person today faces half that faced by a parent, and a quarter of what faced by their grandparent.
Things are getting better, so what its the problem?
At least to me, it is pretty clear. Because while there is actually a considerable improvement in the conditions, the same amount of energy is being spent on what is a reduced problem. In many cases, more energy is being spent, because there has been a concurrent drive toward individual identity, which puts additional attention on anything perceived as negative, and without context of more important aspects of life, mountains get made out of molehills.
When people are scared of being lynched, they don't spend a lot of time concerned with microaggressions.
But as I mentioned to my friend, this isn't just about racism, it is across everything we find important. So even if conditions improve with problems constantly halving in intensity, the intensity of the energy focus on the remaining half is just as high, meaning that more focus is being put on a decreasing area, amplifying the problem even further, making it appear much larger than it actually is.
And the problem is, that unlike our physical selves, our ideological selves that have an ego, identity, do not have a thickness. It means that something like racism which can not only never be eliminated using the halving process, can be focused upon fully, continually amplifying the remaining sliver, constantly in a battle against what is negligible, yet has a massive impact because of the tiny fragment that remains. This is not to say racism isn't a problem today, because it is, but this process means it is always going to be a problem because it can never be reduced to absolute zero.
This comes at an expense.
Because the amount of energy going into tackling a reducing problem, whatever that problem might be, remains the same, the opportunity to put that energy into other aspects of life is also reduced. I see this issue in the LGBTQI&¤#....+??? community, where instead of the energy being spent on being accepting of different kinds of people in general, the energy goes into forcing the acceptance of smaller and smaller fragments of people, at the cost of others. And those fragmentations are limitless until everyone is in a minority of one, with their own rules and conditions that eight billion other people are expected to adhere to, without conflicting their own set of conditions, or that of the other eight billion individual profiles.
The real expense comes to our own wellbeing and advancement as a society however, because rather than improving ourselves, process and conditions, we are instead constantly removing problems that have a diminishing return to solve to the point that solving them is a significant cost and drain on resources. And the ironical thing is that if instead of trying to reduce problems to zero in one area of life, we put our energy into advancing human excellence in areas that matter, many of the challenges we have been fighting so hard against, would likely reduce to the point that it is so negligible, it is unable to be detected.
Most people today, clamouring on about fascists and Nazis, likely have close to zero experience with actual fascists or Nazis, and if they had, they wouldn't be behaving in the way they are. Yet, the level required to "earn the label" as a fascist, has reduced significantly to the point where a fascist is anyone who disagrees with the belief of an individual. And it will keep reducing and reducing, but the same energy will be put into it, even though the problem is not significant to warrant any energy at all. And giving it that energy, empowers the problem.
What we resist, persists.
The more focus we put on these reducing problems past a certain point, the less advancement we can make in other areas of our life that are more valuable to us as individuals and society. For example, if I spend all of my energy concerned with racism and the way I have been treated in the past and even today, I won't have energy left to do much else in life. Not only that, I will be perpetuating the problem by making everything about racism, the lens I would see the world through, and raise my child into. Rather than making the problem better, it would eventually make the problem worse, because improvement by reduction can only go so far, before improvement through addition has to take over. The addition has to come from other aspects of life. ´
You can't stop bigotry, by being a bigot.
The constant focus on the ever increasing pool of fragments of problems, means that as a society, we aren't putting attention into what really matters to us, which are problems that are larger than ourselves, larger than even a small group, and take a large number of diverse skills and perspective to solve. But we can't solve those kinds of problems, because before even being able to work together in a large enough group to solve something like how we are going to survive climate change as a species, we keep focusing on problems like acceptance of people across useless traits as a group, in an infinite process that means we will never be able to get over it, and move on to the things that matter.
What matters?
Today it seems, the only thing that matters to people, are the things that make them upset, no matter how small, how minor, how little impact they actually have - they take our focus. But if we want to lessen them, the best way isn't by forcing others to change, it is by being better ourselves, regardless of how we feel.
Our thickness should be in the skills we have, the impact we make on our world, the good that we do. All the bigotry shouldn't exist as it does, because we are too broad, too advanced, too intelligent, to give it space to survive.
We close the gap not by expansion, not reduction.
Taraz
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I definitely think that some of the stuff is still there, just not as blatant or it has become so systemic that people just don't see it anymore. My wife read a book a while ago call The New Jim Crowe and it covered a lot of the policies and things in the present day that work against minorities while not being overtly against them.
Oh, I am not saying that there isn't further to go with racism. My point is that the way we are going about it means that we will never have "beaten" it enough to move on. There will always be a little more, and the same energy keeping it alive.
Oh, no, I didn't think you were saying we were all set. I know where you are going. Implicit bias is always going to be an issue. It seems on some degree we are just wired to question things that are different.
You've summed up how conservatives view these issues in a way that most conservatives would struggle to find the words. It isn't that most conservatives are racist or bigoted. They're just tired of the constant nuisance of having to accept more and more demands.
It's that part, the cost of others. Pushing harder for diminishing returns has, instead of halving the problem, created a backlash.
There's a Mexican saying I frequently heard growing up, "a fuerza ni los zapatos entran". Literally, it means you can't force shoes to fit. The real meaning is that you can't force somebody to do something they don't want to do, or to like something they're disinterested in. Where I'm going with this is that as the halving distance keeps diminishing, it isn't happening by force. Trying to force big feet into small shoes harms both the feet and the shoes.
It isn't about conservatives and liberals - it is about all of it. This happens across all kinds of bigotry, all kinds of problems. Rather than doing what we can to improve areas, we focus on what has a very low return in value. Individuals do it with their own time too - how much relaxation is enough? Twice as much more, eight times more? At what point does taking the easy path start to harm more than return?
I agree with the idea that while some problems like racism or discrimination have reduced over time, people still spend the same energy fighting what’s left, sometimes even more.
I’ve noticed it too, especially online, where small issues get blown out of proportion, and it feels like we’re stuck fighting shadows instead of making real progress.
Honestly, I think we’d achieve more if we focused that same energy on building ourselves, improving our skills, and creating value in our communities. Like you said, what we resist often persists. When we focus too much on negativity, it grows bigger in our minds. But if we channel that energy into growth and positive change, the world around us naturally becomes better.
Make ourselves better, at least before condemning others for what we think are their faults.
I think it is important to understand that though fighting against racism and other unfairness is essential, we also need to focus on the bigger perspective of human progress.
I reckon if we just simplified all of our global into something like human excellence, environmental health, and sustainable innovation - we could have a pretty great existence.
In our mathematics, it's impossible to arrive at zero. They talked about an infinite macrocosm and microcosm. But in my opinion, the material universe has limits, and the number of atoms born after the Big Bang can be calculated (theoretically).
Yes, because materiality has size. Our opinions about reality do not.
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That part where you made mention that it is almost impossible to eliminate that ideas of racism and bigotry, I can attest to that, because even with the awareness of how bad and emotionally broken it leaves the race some persons still can't understand,this isn't just about the blacks sometimes other peoples of identity, Indians, Chinese. I believe indeed like you said the better way is for us to continue putting in the work, getting better to lessen that ideology if it can't be fully wiped out. But here comes my question, if this still persist what's then the use of the law against racism? . @tarazkp
Read some of the 0/1 star reviews people post about cruise ships.
"The lifts were sometimes a little crowded"
"Not enough TV channels in my room"
"People told me about this great ice sculpture but it was melting so they took it away before I had a chance to see it"
You can spend millions solving every possible problem, giving people a level of safety and luxury undreamed of by generations past; an army of doting servants waiting to fulfil every whim, and people still conjure up grievances.
I guess that the law of diminishing returns applies to this as well...