Prejudice is a Thief, Ignorance its Protege
A few years ago, around 2015, a colleague of mine called me in to a meeting and asked me what I thought about cryptocurrency.
I knew nothing about cryptocurrency. I had done no research. I had never tried it. I knew nothing about its utility. I might have heard it mentioned in a couple movies or on the news. Yet, when my colleague asked after my thoughts, I puffed my chest up and said, "It's not real money, it's a scam."
My colleague looked at me for a bit, nodded slowly, and said nothing more.
Later, in early 2018, I was writing for a site where you had the choice to choose between a crypto payment or cash.
"Show me the money," I said. "I want money I can trust. I don't believe in this crypto thing." Again, I spoke with a chest of conviction though I still knew nothing about cryptocurrency.
In my sheltered corner of the world, Bitcoin's parabolic rise in 2017 was not mainstream conversation. It never featured in the news. Very few people knew anything about it, and if we heard anything at all, it was from a bunch of stakeholders with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And so, ultimately, I took payments in cash.
By 2020, however, I was actually learning about cryptocurrency, and I was eagerly looking around for ways to earn or even buy crypto. I'm a complete believer today, but I lost several valuable years because of prejudice, because I was not open to a new experience, because I did not give the benefit of the doubt, because I blindly bought into established doctrine.
The above example I used was a matter of finance, but how many times throughout our lives do we make decisions based on prejudice without sometimes even knowing that the biggest obstruction to our progress- physically, mentally, and spiritually- are the chains that we bind ourselves with.
Prejudice is a Thief, Ignorance its Protege
Prejudice steals wealth you never knew you had. It's like a slick salesman who comes along and recognizes that you have access to something valuable, and so he sells you a story, makes you believe that the valuable item is worthless or dangerous, and he cons you into exchanging it for a few useless trinkets.
If you are too prejudiced to learn about something, then you'd be stuck in ignorance. Most often, we don't know even know that we are ignorant. In fact, we may think that we are quite wise or clever and we hold forth in that belief, repeating the things that we have been taught without ever trying to learn about things ourselves. Sadly, sometimes the teachers we trust, deliver lessons from a place of prejudice as well.
In my case, for example, when it came to cryptocurrency, I trusted the news outlets I followed, and so when those outlets labelled crypto as criminal money or as fake money, I bought into that narrative, it fit with my prejudice, and I ignorantly told a friend that it was not worth investing in.
Guys, should you get the time today, please visit my sponsors and show them some love.
These are some awesome content creators that I truly appreciate and am inspired by.But prejudice isn't just limited to finance, is it? Prejudice is very often the lens through which we view the world. As a woman, for example, I remember seething when I read that one of my favorite authors, Sir V.S. Naipaul (may his soul rest in eternal peace) disparaged a woman's ability to write.
After reading this, I continued to treasure his books, of course, my love for Naipaul or his work did not die, but I couldn't help feeling disappointed in the man.
Prejudice is a barrier. It is learned behavior which sometimes informs the way we interact with the world. Sometimes, unfortunately, prejudice and generations of inherited mistrust has blocked healthy interaction and growth between races and cultures. Even worse, sometimes, we pass our prejudices on to others who might respect our perspective, education, influence, and power.
And if I may go just a bit deeper, though still just scraping the top of the iceberg with this, think of entire schools of thought based on the philosophies of one man or woman, learned though he or she may be. In politics, for example, there are different schools of thoughts. There are different schools of thoughts in philosophy as well. If we examine this closely, my friends, I am sure that we can see that in almost every area of our lives, there's gonna be a group of people who believe that their way of doing things is the right and only way.
Prejudice is the Principal in a School of Hate
"When you cut me, do I not bleed?" - Merchant of Venice
Culturally, we hear stories of persons who suffer under the weight of prejudice and are denied access and opportunities because of their genetics- the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, the shape of their nose, the size of their lips. Misguided opinions are formed about them because of their age, the way they dress, the way they speak, the countries they may hail from, their beliefs, the way they eat, or even the families they are born into.
"... If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch"- The Holy Bible
Sadly, if prejudice prevents us from interacting with each other and learning from each other, we may walk around the world and die in ignorance, for by choosing to follow along blindly, we denied ourselves an opportunity to widen our perspectives on everything.
A man who is prejudiced, very often doesn't think he is. Enlightened though we may each think we are, we each carry prejudice for some thing or some person in some way. I raise this issue today, on Easter Sunday, for I think that today, as any other day to be honest, provides us with another opportunity to think on our learned behaviors and the lenses we wear to view the world.
Maybe if we can resolve to rid ourselves of this habit and to keep an open mind to learning and understanding more about the nuances of the world we share, then we can truly concentrate our efforts on building a better world together.
Sidenote: I truly wish my old friends would ask me about cryptocurrency now.
Resources
Conceiving opinions that isn't based on actual experience can really be terrible, because we are inculcating the ideas we have on something or someone into the hearts of others, and those ones would go about, believing in our opinion and spreading out more disbeliefs and doubts into the minds of many others. I also never had an idea about crypto currency, infact up until now, I still have little or no idea about it. How read was introduced to me is just a story for another day. Nft, eterum and other crypto currencies are far from being understood by me. I'll try, opening my heart to learning just like you said, there's definitely more to learn about in the world of crypto currencies and just another thing.