Invisible face of prejudice

Lately I've been having a recurrent thought about the problems of the world. I feel they are usually about statistics related ignorance. Prejudice is intimately connected to that perception, but not in the way most of its critics usually describe. In fact, the opposite case is the true one. The reason why that happens is that those who openly defend prejudiced views are usually quite stupid and irrational.

Thus, it seems to make sense to attribute these very characteristics to prejudice itself. But while the moral condemnation of prejudice generally has solid base, the statistical one has not. This knowledge is key, not for prejudice to be spread out, but for it to be contained. Prejudice is hard wired in humans. It's intrinsic to our cognitive process. We learn quite early in life that our species is unique because of our rationality. That's not even a half truth. We are indeed capable of rational train of thought (in highly variable degrees). However, this rationality is always mixed with plain instinct, but also, and in a very unconscious manner, several layers of prejudice.

This makes it much less of a moral flaw than a cognitive limitation. Every second, we're exposed to tons of raw data. Our current neurological hardware wouldn't possibly be able to process that rationally or even consciously. So while we are able to place our focus on a specific issue and voluntarily make effort to solve it, this is applied to a tiny part of the problems we face everyday. The vast majority is tackled in a semiconscious and automatic fashion. For these, there's no voluntary action. That doesn't mean solution is random or magic. We possess several structures in our brains that are capable of super fast and accurate action. So do many of the so called inferior creatures. We share this mechanism for movement coordination for example.

It would be quite overwhelming, if possible at all, if we had to rationally deal with all relevant physical variables that allow us to drive a car. But obviously this is done unconsciously, and quite precisely so. Driving is such a great example because it's absolutely unnatural. There's no possibility of drawing from instinct when dealing with a 20th century man made machine, which proves there's something else at play.

This doesn't apply only to movement related tasks. The same also happens with a wide array of interactions we have with others and the environment. That's when prejudice comes in. It is mostly a mental shortcut, allowing complex scenarios to be evaluated and acted upon with a great deal of precision and speed. For these mechanisms to be selected by evolution, they don't need to be flawless. The trick is to save time and energy while providing descent enough results. This extra time and energy can be far more useful than, let's say, a 10% improvement in situation diagnostic precision. 

To sum everything up, my point here is to show two things: first of all, we're not as rational as we think we are. And second, prejudice is, together with other automatic mechanisms to process data, the reason why we can afford doing this quickly enough, without getting hurt or killed. 

That said, I feel the only way we can fight prejudice is to understand its purpose and utility. Purely saying it's bad is too simplistic and hardly adds any meaningful value to combating its harmful effects. The way out of this imbroglio is not only prejudice related knowledge, but its meta-knowledge. Bringing social justice to the world must indeed be in mankind agenda. But advocating for mere prejudice elimination is almost as innocuous and stupid as prejudice itself may appear to the more spirited minds.