Lately, I've found myself thinking that more people need to be on Sombunall:
1. sombunall
A term meaning 'Some but not all', as defined by Robert Anton Wilson in his book Quantum Psychology
Sombunall Christians are pig-headed bible thumpers.
This is a handy prescription for ridding oneself of useless generalizations that impede thinking rationally about whole groups of people. For example, when thinking about, say, Muslims building a mosque near Ground Zero, it might be helpful for people to remind themselves that: Only sombunall Muslims are terrorists, which could really be said of sombunall Christians, Jews, Buddhists, etc....and one could as easily admit that sombunall Americans agree with the Constitutional freedoms of religion, speech and assembly, and see where that idea takes you.
Sombunall Palestinians support Hamas. Sombunall people are outraged by human rights abuses. Sombunall Americans are dissatisfied by government. Sombunall Teabaggers are racists; sombunall liberals are elitists. Sombunall Christians really are Creationists, and sombunall atheists are in favor of "guerrilla ontology".
All of which reminds me that people are very prone to generalizing because, if I should hazard a guess, we needed to do so in order to respond quickly to a world that was full of threats (poisonous snakes, lions, etc.) in the developing years of our species, and that this vestigial bias-confirming organ within the brain can become diseased somewhat like an appendix, and be in need of excision. Also, I recall that I miss Robert Anton Wilson. Even the "woo" stuff he wrote about was very instructive, in its way. But his specific strength was lending his readers perspective to see things from different angles, multiple perspectives, to freely doubt, and be okay if an issue wasn't always black and white. I think this is a timely remedy for sombunall the problems I've read about, lately.
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