ost of us correctly consider that we are mature when we are capable of presenting ourselves to the world in a calm, consistent and thoughtful manner. When this is true for us, we appear in control our ourselves, responsible and impressive. But most of us go about trying to develop maturity in completely the wrong way. If you have read the article about what to change about yourself, you will have an inkling of what I’m talking about. Most of us practice being adults by retreating or stopping. We tend to want to back out of situations where we find ourselves out over our skis (e.g. engaging in nasty fights with our spouse) and we try to stop what we consider to be poor behaviors (e.g. excessive comfort seeking). Adulting requires, rather, continuing. We need to work through sticky situations to get to a new place of greater skill (e.g. understanding the valuable process of skillful fighting.) We need to continue to do the behaviors that we do well, but rein them in appropriately with a balancing skill (e.g. using self-discipline to stabilize beneficial comfort seeking).
I would imagine that everything you have been taught to date belies those ideas. But stick with me, and over the next three articles we will uncover a hidden and powerful route to maturity. This article describes our first step – how to move through our fear of biases to a deeper understanding of how important biases are to humans. The two articles after this one outline the second step – how to tactfully explore the difference gap that biases invariably create which allows us to achieve maturity by sidestepping biased gridlock. The final goal of this novel maturational process is to lock ourselves firmly in adulthood by integrating our most basic human drives – attachment and autonomy – into an orthogonal (balancing) powerhouse called differentiation.
Note: Throughout the next three articles, I will be flexing my feminist muscles as I make the case for why women’s ways of being are a nonnegotiable perspective for humans to integrate with men’s ways of being if we are to mature as a species. That may sound rather highfalutin, but I think these articles demonstrate this truth: if we could eliminate the patriarchal elevation of male biases, both humans and the planet would be better off. When we are all more capable of presenting ourselves to the world in a calm, consistent and thoughtful manner, the politics of humanity will run more smoothly and decisions will be made will be for the benefit of all.
The tale of biases
We begin by clarifying why it makes sense for people to rely on biases to guide their decision-making process initially. Our reliance on biases should be seen, however, as the developmental step that brings us only to the brink of adulthood. We want to be able to move throughh the bias-forming step, over a significant maturational threshold and into an adult relationship with our biases.
We start, therefore, with the story of human bias.
Our human brain responds to the chaos of the universe by trying to categorize as many things as possible. We first learn as tiny tykes to classify pretty much everything into two groups: this and not this. Mommy and not mommy. Boy and not boy. Tall and not tall. We next move into the vocabulary of compare and contrast. Tall and short. Boy or girl. Many years are spent tidying up our relationship with complexity by sorting things into more and more nuanced categories.
It would be hard to imagine how we would experience life without learning how to do this simplification step. The sameness of everything coming at us would render us overwhelmed with uncomprehensible chaos as we try to drive our lives through flash flood after flash flood of data. It would be like our experience of hearing a foreign language coming at us rapid fire. We aren’t able to distinguish words let alone the meaning of the noises we are hearing. Like learning to speak, children first simplify with elementary sorting.
Once our world becomes somewhat organized, our next task is to evaluate and then choose which categories will come to define us. The very act of choosing our memberships increases the legitimacy of our chosen categories within our minds. We further deepen our bonds with our tribe by fully engaging with it. If we are at all lucky, we are each able to do what we do best by participating in these groups. So far, so good. We have organized our world to a large extent, and we have found our place in that world and that membership allows us to develop our strengths.
What we are talking about is the process of developing a bias. If we judiciously reject the current pejorative sense of this noun, we can imagine that there might be developmentally appropriate biases (juvenile versions of loyalty such as little boys hating little girls or the us-versus-them energy of high school team sports) as well as biases that serve us well throughout our lifetimes (spiritual faith or a commitment to civic engagement.) The trick is, of course, to know which is which. If we look a little more closely at how biases form, we can feel pride in the choices we’ve made to participate in the groups we’ve chosen. Then absent shame, we can better investigate which biases advance us toward adulthood and which don’t.
A bias gets created when two realities are placed at opposite ends of the line that describes their relationship to each other and we choose one end. Again, this process is natural for humans – to take a predisposition to believe in something or act a certain way and drive it out to the edge of a continuum. There can be very positive aspects of this behavior. When we enthusiastically extend loyalty toward a category that has come to define us, we tend to work to support our group mates. That commitment strengthens our willingness to practice the skills necessary for membership and to bond with other group members while it soothes our existential fears by giving us a reassuring sense of belonging to a winning team.
Ultimately, we are all supposed to be biased – to believe wholeheartedly in the ways we have chosen to lead our lives. How bizarre it would be to imagine otherwise. Who could possibly make the case that we would be healthier individually if we refused to buy into what we have decided is in our best interest, denied our personal choices or rejected our idiosyncratic route to personal fulfillment? “To breathe is to judge,” said Camus. Humans breathe life into the judgments they make when they earnestly participate in the biases they have decided work for them.
So we all move out into our world looking for reasons to believe.
Seductive certainty
Here is where things start going off the rails.
The bait biases use to beguile us into joining them is certainty.
Certainty certainly sells. When offered a morsel of seeming truth, we are often dazzled into accepting it as such. From aphorisms to simplistic self-help books to one-sided punditry, anything that appears to offer us an easier way to comprehend our world can seduce our overburdened minds. Our wish for a simplifying silver bullet isn’t illogical. It makes sense to seek clarity and ease when facing an ever-expanding, ever-quickening world of data.
How can we not want easy answers when we are facing too many tough questions? So why isn’t it okay to follow time-worn guideposts as we navigate through our life? Why is the easy way not always the best way? Life is difficult, human childhood is exceedingly long so why not depend on the short-hand answers that biases provide to us?
We can’t swallow the bait offered to us because certainty is only possible with cultish, one-dimensional thinking. In other words, when someone is trying to sell us something from a place of certainty, they offer us only the view from their end of a continuum. An unquestioning position at one end of a continuum pulls us back out of our maturing process. Remember the mommy/not mommy stage? We want to move forward out of the this/not this stage into the compare and contrast stage where we allow information to come in that deepens our understanding of the world. Too often any efforts we might make to open up our thinking are met by pressure to conform. If we arrest here, we will be prone to relying on faux certainty as we make our life choices.
So the seductiveness of biases urges us to actually take a step backward – away from maturity. Herded back into compliance, we become vulnerable to a cascade of problems caused by the human need to initially join with the biases of our choice.
The dark side of biases
Biases are good. But they never exist in a cultural vacuum. It is also natural for us to push the ends of each continuum out into the land of chauvinism – especially when we feel the need to defend our position. That adolescent us-versus-them defensiveness occurs because the importance of biases also lies on a continuum. In other words, our preferences can range from the sublimely important (the value of living up to Kant’s categorical imperative) to the ridiculously immaterial (thin crust or deep dish.)
Depending on the importance of our biases, what tends to happen next is that biases become ranked, creating the dangerous hierarchy of difference. It is the closed-mindedness of hierarchy that contaminates an otherwise healthy bias. Fear-driven feelings of disdain or hatred toward those who believe differently set us on the zero-sum road toward hostility.
As we have established, where there is a difference, people will appropriately start to choose sides in order to establish their bias. What we now have to establish is the sad truth that biases also birth competition. Competition is a complicated human activity, but when it is endorsed with a thrill-of-victory/agony-of-defeat masculine poetry, it encodes and entrenches the rights of the strong to overpower the weak. You can see how this absurd position gets created if you link the aphorisms “Might makes right.” (Adin Ballou) with “History is written by the victors.” (Winston Churchill)
Further down the competition road is violence.
Where there is competition there will be the hierarchy of winner over loser, meaning someone is bound to end up feeling superior. Humans generate violence when the winning end of a continuum feels entitled to its superiority in a particularly problematic manner. Winners will start to gather resources at the expense of others. These resources – titles, land, money, troops, political power, health care, education and so on – can then be used to amplify and perpetuate superior positioning. This doesn’t even have to be done with malintent, just massive empathic failure.
And it needs to be said here that people most often forget that they have inherited a ride along the route to superiority. When you are born into an institutionalized advantage, someone, at some point in time, forced the issue and made that privileged location a reality. Back in the past, exclusions were violent. Blood may not have been shed to give you your place at the winner’s table, but people bled when the table was built.
In addition to asking how winning leads to violence, we need to ask: How does entitlement come about?
To answer that we must now enter the land of superstitious thinking – believing something to be so because we so badly want it to be so.
The superstitious thinking of entitlement looks like this: If I am successful in life and thus obtain a ton of clout, that dominance proves that the way I’ve chosen to live my life is the existentially correct way. There will no longer be any need for me to spend any time or energy scrutinizing my life choices (my biases) to any phenomenological depth. I can happily go about my day swaddled in the social endorsement of having a well-solved life.
As a lovely side note, my success also means I deserve all the trappings of a life well designed, meaning I don’t have to exercise any self-examination over my pattern of choices. I can sidestep guilt over owning all my nifty stuff and exercising the clout granted to me. As educator Paulo Freire succinctly and satirically put it, entitled folks believe "to have is to be.” The gist being, I am entitled to both everything I have and everything I want, even when my having more means that others having less.
Because of this superstitious thinking, too many people, too much of the time avoid authentically facing those existential givens that each and every human faces as they work to create a life that best fits their particular gifts and traits. Their effort goes, instead, into those acts that allow them to gather clout. This desperate need to avoid existential angst is exemplified in the saying attributed to Malcolm Forbes: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Forbes may have had his tongue ostensibly in his cheek when he said this, but he was a serious toy collector over his lifetime.
While avoiding facing scary existential truths may protect a person from discomfort, it also “protects” a person from learning how to deepen their relationship with how they judge what they judge leading them to choose what they choose.
The bias-defending step, then, is the developmental stage where so many of us stall out as we move along the otherwise healthy and natural process of forming open-minded partisanship. We get stuck in closed-minded biases for the most existential of reasons. If we fear that we may be “doing our life wrong” and yet try to pretend otherwise, our fear of that fear will distort our behavior in rather unpleasant ways. Distinct from existential dread (that very appropriate worry about how we are doing so far in life), this compounded fear drives us to panic about anything Fate can do that can rob us of our entitlement buffer – all the trappings we accumulate that protect us from losing our winning status. Because few of us are given either cultural or familial training in how to deal with existential fear, when it morphs into the even more terrifying fear of fear, we will often retreat into cul-de-sacs of protective biases and surround ourselves with like-minded folks.
This retreat into enclaves of agreement often creates a breeding ground for hostility leading to violence. When frightened folks gather, they often collude in panicking each other into believing they must increase their drive for clout. (Trillionaires? Really?) Once that zero-sum belief gets established, a self-perpetuating spiral away from the best in folks will absolutely cause them to subjugate others. And we can quote de Beauvoir here: “All oppression creates a state of war.”
What we have so far is this: Humans are touchingly susceptible to an overreliance on biases because we all need to initially simplify our world as we work to understand as much of it as possible. Our oversimplifications are comforting to us. But a lack of training in existentially adaptable thinking leaves us so afraid that we are not doing our lives “right” that we fail to move very far beyond soothing, solipsistic simplification – including relying rigidly on our biases.
A clear and virulent example of this distortion process is the elevation of men’s ways of being over women’s ways of being. The insidious problem with this bias hierarchy is that it splits humanity in half. No one flourishes in a sexist us-versus-them environment.
The foundational hierarchy is the patriarchy
More often than not, voices of certainty underlying cultural biases reflect the unchecked viewpoint of men. Too long left unchallenged, the thinking of males has calcified into the rules of life that are responsible for both sexism and misogyny. Philosopher Kate Manne drew a clarifying distinction between the two – sexism being the justification of the entitlement of males and misogyny being the violence used against women to keep them in their one-down place. This distinction clarifies the important role that sexism (the hierarchy) has in creating misogyny (acts of subjugation).
Knowing what we know now about how biases are established, we can see how an otherwise appropriate male bias becomes distorted into the violent perpetuation of sexism. Sex differences in human physiology launch an initially appropriate bias distinction between males and females, but the process goes tragically awry when the male bias is elevated through misogyny.
Biology and cultures combine to both define masculinity and to establish it as the benchmark of humanity. Men, with their greater physical strength and freedom from pregnancy and nursing, have long been at liberty to pursue their passions relatively unfettered. Such liberty optimizes their route to clout. Their subsequent surer access to education and professional success further contributes to their ability (as well as their sense of entitlement) to set the rules. Men occupy the highest level of every human endeavor, and from that position they continue to determine what’s what. Hence their certainty. They define it, they achieve it, c’est ça!
Further, because housework continues to appear well-matched with the duties of being a parent, and because a well-tended home environment increases child safety, women became locked into domesticity. While many women relish mastering the art and science of home management, the time spent acquiring these typically trivialized skills becomes time away from mastering skills that might move them along a more personal route to power. Men have been able to routinely avoid a career detour into domesticity, remaining free to pursue more clout and to be not only unimpressed by, but also unaware of the depth of knowledge, discipline, passion and sacrifice it takes to run a household.
As you can see, because men have invariably dominated the public domain and have relegated women to the private domain, they have naturally organized society to value the power of the public over the private. The public domain is where we obtain status, thus the more one moves in the public world, the more importance one can accrue.
It should go without saying that if you entrench the male bias into the concrete foundations of glass-ceilinged institutions, that very state subjugates women. Legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put it this way:
To be on the bottom of a hierarchy is certainly different from being on the top of one, but it is not simply difference that most distinguishes the two. It is, in fact, the lesser access to resources, privileges, credibility, legitimacy, authority, pay, bodily integrity, security and power that makes the two unequal.
So we must acknowledge that, to this day, the human world remains in thrall to the elevated masculine bias – the foundational hierarchy of difference that distorts how humans interact with each other and with their world by allowing men to reinforce their biases over the biases of women.
Let me insert this caveat: The narrative I’m using regarding male and female outlooks is for clarification only. By and large, there is a gender difference between the perspectives of men and women. Between an individual man and woman, the difference can be negligible.
As long as the patriarchy establishes what’s what, two realities will follow from that fact. First, what it is to be human continues to be synonymous with what it is to be a privileged male human. In other words, the level of human potency in each of us will be measured against elite male-determined exemplars. And second, the ongoing hierarchy of difference steals from us access to the thoughts of half the world by delegitimizing women’s thinking. When women are silenced, the world is robbed of half of the truth. All the choices made by current human cultures are, therefore, half baked.
It is clear that, while bias formation is necessary and appropriate, it is not the endpoint of human development – either for individuals or for our species. Humans get stuck in their biased state when one end of a continuum becomes established as the arbiter of certainty. The resulting hierarchy is oppressive and all oppression creates the likelihood of violence. The most notable hierarchy, the patriarchy, leads to the violence of misogyny.
In conclusion
The first leg of our journey has shown us how an overreliance on certainty in general and male certainty specifically have caused too many folks to arrest at a developmental stage way below optimal human functioning. We must replace the vulnerability caused by our naïveté about the maturation process with accurate and compelling instructions for how to move through the tricky first step and into the second.
To wit: Choosing our particular biases represents an appropriate, initial developmental stage. The route to maturity requires that we move beyond that developmental stage and into the ability to differentiate. We hamper our ability to take that second step in two ways. If we shame the act of forming a bias, we will make it very difficult to regard and assess our biases, leaving us vulnerable to rigidly and perhaps violently adhering to them. And yet, if we are too proud of our biases, our chauvinism will shut off incoming data that can help us move out of an over-defensive stance relative to them. Once released from both shame and chauvinism, we are ready to move forward developmentally with an openness to exploring our biases. The next article provides a clear protocol for an open-minded partisanship that allows for mature exploration of our biases.