Constants

I'm a shameless magpie when it comes to ideas. That's why the bulk of this post is someone else's work. But it's good work!

My friend has been musing of late about constants. He started out thinking about how hard it would be to simulate air in a computer program, because it's too chaotic and doesn't lend itself to neat mathematical constants. He then continued to think about other things which aren't constants:

There are a lot of them. We make assumptions. We ignore variety in favour of a simpler, unified outlook. It's actually not a bad thing, really -- it's necessary to deal with the chaos of reality. I remember the first time I did wallpapering -- okay, the only time -- and it surprised me. The walls weren't straight. The bathroom wasn't a perfect block, but more trapezoidal. It makes sense once I realized it, but until then ... well... I'd just picked the nicest, easiest numbers, and assumed they were so.

The same thing happened when people studied the orbits of planets. They wanted them to be circles. Not ellipses, as they turned out to be. Except, wait a sec -- ARE they ellipses, or is that just the nearest equivilant -- once more, we make things nice, smooth, and homogeneous when they're probably not -- not really.

So, what's my point?

Groups aren't people.

Let me run that by you again. Groups aren't people. People aren't groups.

An example, maybe?

The ACLU does not have a anti-christian agenda. The ACLU does have a anti-christian agenda. Republicans want war and dictatorship. Republicans want freedom and peace. I could go on, but ... eh.

All four of those statements are true. (Five if you include my ability and lack of desire to go on). Contradictory, but true. Why? Because the ACLU has thousands of people in it. There are millions of Republicans. Some of them are this; some of them are that. Groups are not constants. Groups aren't people -- they CONTAIN people. And yes, people have agendas, and some of them are hateful and some of them are loving and some of them don't even know who they are or why they're in a group to begin with... but to indicate that a group is one thing or another as if every member of the group is the same as every other is akin to racism, sexism, or any of those other discriminatory things that people tend to frown on.

So, I get a bit annoyed when people talk about a group as if it were a single entity; a single will, a single purpose, a single group-mind controlling everything. It's a tactic of hate, usually, because it's easy to hate groups -- and it's easy to assign them motives, because there's bound to be someone like that in the group, somewhere.

So -- groups of people? Not a constant.

People are people.

Credit goes to the Pirate Pope.