Our first line of psychological defense against those whose conceptions of reality are different from our own is to derogate or belittle them, diminishing the threat their beliefs pose to our own. They are ignorant savages (like the Lenapes), or servants of the devil, or they’re brainwashed by evil masters. Perhaps they are not even human. The Nazis portrayed Jews as rats. In the Inuit, Mbuti, Orokawa, Yanomamo, and Kalili cultures, the word for their own group means “man” or “human,” implying, of course, that members of other groups are not human. Traditional Arabs from Nejd in Saudi Arabia
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