Ordinary people’s prejudices are evaluative judgments that strip victims of humanity

Evidence

Prejudices of the ‘vast middle’ are not automatic, or unconscious, they are not lodged in people’s psyches but rather are evaluative prejudices – they transform and shape the degree of social and moral esteem, and social approval, of a specifi c category of people within the boundaries of a self-righteous, self-suffi cient moral collective. Depriving people of social esteem and social approval means depriving them of their humanity, presenting them as less than human. Prejudices of the ‘vast middle’ contain the seeds of eliminationist discourses, continually repressed and inhibited by the requirements of righteous morality. — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 701

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘vast middle’ prejudice contains seeds of eliminationism—held in check only by righteous morality—is a dense, paradigm-shifting idea worth sitting with.
• XREF: Echoes Milgram/Browning’s ‘ordinary men’ and the surprising-claims thread about bureaucracy masking atrocity; also resonates with the collective emotional-capital framing from paragraph 699.

Related

• Open and closed mind concepts only map the extremes of belief (similarity 0.79)
• Understanding prejudice requires cultural, not merely psychological, analysis (similarity 0.79)