 There is an enormous amount of racial and social tension in the United States right now, and it seems to be getting worse by the week. There is one reason why this is happening, and there is one solution to the problem. The reason is because of people's ideas. And one idea in particular, that what is more fundamental to you than your humanity, is your group identity, is a label that people put on you. So individuals no longer are seen as fundamentally peers, as two different humans with different skin colors and different group identity. No, now they're seen as two totally different things. You have black men and white men, and they're not both peers, they're not both equals, they're not both humans with different skin color. No, they are fundamentally different types of things at odds with one another. The racial economic or socioeconomic labels that people put on you have become more fundamental than your own humanity. This not only is an incorrect way of viewing the world, it is a dangerous one, and is the cause of so much tension in the States. The way that this gets solved is by changing our ideas. We have to recognize what is actually the case, which is fundamentally the racial economic, socioeconomic differences amongst us are relatively minor and don't place us into different categories of things. What we are is fundamentally humans. Now I'm not claiming that we should dismiss the relevance of differences in skin color and how people experience the world, quite the opposite. What I'm saying is I can recognize that people with black skin in the United States are going to have a radically different experience of life than I am in the United States because of my skin color. Now I can recognize that as equals, as black and white equals from two different perspectives. I can recognize that without there being some kind of tension that that fact is the case. And in fact I can sympathize with my black peers if it's the case that as a function of something as arbitrary as skin color, they are experiencing the world in a more challenging and difficult way than I am. What is so divisive is when people think that difference in experience runs so deep as to be fundamental where the black experience and the white experience are two totally different things that one cannot comprehend the other. A white man cannot possibly understand what it is like to be a human with black skin and the black human being cannot possibly understand the life of the individual with white skin. This is a lie and it's divisive. When you see people for what they are, which is fundamentally humans with arbitrary differences in skin color that unfortunately affect how they experience life, then the kind of anger, the desire for reparations, the idea that there were past injustices committed 200 years ago, therefore they have to be corrected today by the descendants of the individuals who perpetrated the injustice, all of that goes away. Or this idea that I, if I'm a business owner, should alter my hiring business practices, not based on what makes my business successful, but based on the racial and ethnic arbitrary criteria, the color and ethnic diversity of the workforce which I hire just purely as a function of the individual's skin color, that is divisive. It causes resentment between people who have differences in those arbitrary categories. So if somebody comes along, let's say self-righteous liberal comes along and tells me that I must hire individuals with longer noses because those individuals with big noses have been discriminated against for such and such a reason. And now I am legally forced, let's say, to hire those individuals even if they're not as good for that particular job as somebody without the big nose immediately that causes a bit of resentment towards the individual with the bigger nose because I think you now have some kind of privilege. I, my behavior is now constrained because of your arbitrary characteristics that I really don't give a shit about, but I'm forced to give a shit about because of the law. That is divisive. It used to be that the desired end state was something like color blindness where individuals could be judged based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And for some reason, maybe in the past 15 years or so I'm not sure, that end state has dissolved. The end state is no longer equality, genuine, peer-ship, honest, truthful equality between races and between different groups of individuals. Now the end state seems to be subjugating a group of individuals that oppressed this group and flipping it. So now this group of individuals can oppress the former subjugators even if the actual individuals who are being subjugated are the descendants of the oppressors. So for example, somebody with white skin like myself, I should be forced to pay more taxes because somebody in my distant ancestry might have been a racist or a slave owner. I can think of few things more unifying than to see somebody else to be able to say, look, I'm going to speak frankly with you and not treat you differently, not treat you differently because of the color of your skin. That is what is unifying. Acknowledge the problems in society, past and present, but refuse to give in and treat somebody different because of their skin color. Now what I want to know is who objects to that? Intuitively, I have an understanding of who it objects. It's something like wealthy white liberals who have this idea of how they want to make the world a better place by dividing people into racial categories and then playing chess with them. That group I think actually would object. But who in the actual ethnic groups are going to object to the idea of, hey, look, crafts happened in the past, but the end state that we want is equality. Therefore, let's start acting like equals. Who's going to object to that? We have reached a place in our culture where genuine equality, the desire for equality and color blindness is mistaken as racism. We need a cultural movement to intervene and say, stop, this is absurd. If you are treating individuals as equals, you're doing it right. Let's not worry about trying to craft this narrative of correcting the injustices from 50, 100, 250 years ago. The scales were balanced this way and now they have to be balanced this way for some period of time and then they can be equalized. No, that ain't going to work. It hasn't worked for the past several years. Let's acknowledge it and let's not worry about inbalancing. Let's go straight to the end state, which is genuine equality amongst human beings.