Stereotypes are crude memes that have been the cause of much adversity, but I don’t think we should try to dispose of them from our society outright. I doubt that’s even possible. The use of stereotypes usually results in some kind of Us vs. Them scenario where someone is unfairly judged, but I think it’s also possible to use stereotypes to help better understand others. First, we need to direct the evolution of stereotypes to a much more useable form. Any unfounded and decidedly derogatory stereotypical ideas should be shed away, leaving little more than the grain of truth at the nucleus. Then these broad generalizations should be diversified, so we have more stereotypes to choose from. It’s best to think of it in an object-oriented way, but I don’t want to get into that right now . But with a greater variety of fleshed-out stereotypes, it’ll closer resemble the actualities they charicature and any still-misguided prejudices will be less likely to resemble the gross generalizations we have now. And after that, we can work on creating a greater selection of hackneyed clichés. Eventually, we’ll all be able to make our own damned clip art! Originality and imitation will then become one! Whatever the hell that means???

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2000 at 8:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.