So I'm reading the book by Susan Cain: Quiet:The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking last night and it's late so at first I'm not really sure that what I had just read was real. Then when I looked again this morning, there it was.
Last night I was at the point where she was writing about Jerome Kagan's studies. The fact that she does not cite any of his written works or give a direct quote indicates to me that this is her interpretation of his thoughts. The point is that whether he said it or not, she presented it as truth.
Take Disney movies, for example: Kagan and his colleagues speculate that Disney animators unconsciously understood high reactivity when they drew sensitive figures like Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Dopey with blue eyes, and brasher characters like Cinderella's stepsisters, Grumpy, and Peter Pan with darker eyes.
Later in that same paragraph:
Kagan even speculates that some men prefer women with fair skin and blue eyes because they unconsciously code them as sensitive.
Yikes.
The world in which the overwhelming majority of the 7+ billion human beings live is a vastly interesting and complex place filled with people who possess incredible courage and strength and indeed seemingly limitless compassion every single day. People cry out for justice and are so often unheard and oppressed.
Words like those I read last night - promoting a very tiny minority of humans as being extra-special - are diametrically opposed to the needs of real human beings and recreate the worst our species has had to offer over time.