The Unfamiliar Without a Verdict

Public fear easily turns the unfamiliar into a threat, and then calls that reaction common sense or instinct. Not knowing someone else’s culture is normal; a confident verdict passed with insufficient knowledge is already a separate choice.

People tend to trust the familiar and to grow wary of the unknown. On top of that come family, environment, media and individual stories that are easy to mistake for a description of a whole group.

The first feeling isn’t always chosen consciously. The next action is, to a much greater extent.

You can notice:

This is unfamiliar to me.

I feel wary.

I have little information.

That is more honest than turning your reaction into a property of the other person:

They are dangerous.

They are all like that.

There’s no dealing with them.

Ignorance calls for no shame. It calls for limiting your confidence.

A person’s behaviour in bed, their religion, sex, origin or orientation don’t give a full description of character. They may matter in a particular area of a relationship, but they don’t replace watching for honesty, care, responsibility and boundaries.

Just as little is said about merit by what a person received at birth: language, nationality, skin colour or belonging to the majority. That can be a source of connection, memory and cultural pride. But pride in a tradition is different from asserting one’s own superiority.

Belonging to a group doesn’t make a person better. It can create an obligation not to disgrace the group — though even that is fairly heavy work for one person.

Better to answer for your own actions than for the symbolic value of all your ancestors and contemporaries.

The difference between the two formulations shows in what follows from them. “I’m not used to them talking loudly in the stairwell” leads to a conversation with the neighbours and possibly to an agreement about hours. “They’re noisy, they’re all like that” leads to a complaint, a discussion in the building chat, and a certainty that nothing can refute, because nobody was going to check it anyway. About a second passes between the two sentences, and the whole choice fits inside it — the rest is consequences.

The first version leaves room for new data, the second closes the question. A verdict saves effort exactly once, and then demands that reality never touch it again.