What do you know to be absolutely certain beyond even the slightest shadow of a doubt? Do you know where you live? Do you know your relationship status? Do you know how much money you have? Frankly, unless your name is Antipholus you probably do know all of those things for certain. That being said, it is dangerous to just make assumptions in life. You never know when someone may know better than you about something, anything. Any moment can be the moment that you show yourself to be incompetent, arrogant, or foolish. So beware preconceived notions, you may be wrong.

Let me start this week by telling a story of when I had fallen victim to this kind of thinking. When I was in high school I took two years of German. So naturally when I had a foreign language requirement in college I jumped straight to the language that I was the most familiar with. The summer before my return to German I spent a great deal of time trying to refresh my memory and fill in the blank spots so that I would be prepared. When showing a new student around the campus I spoke my broken German a little bit, but I failed to find a word. He encouraged me, and when I gave up he gave me the word. As it turned out he was a student from an international high school in Germany.

I had incorrectly assumed that no one I might have bumped into would speak German in any capacity. Of course, the stakes were not very high with those given circumstances. And yet what may have happened if instead of assuming he didn’t speak German I had assumed he couldn’t speak at all, assumed that he was a Nazi when I learned where he came from?

These kinds of biases are fundamentally wrong. To use the word that everyone knows them as they are nothing but prejudices. That has become a dirty word in our day and age. While it is true that prejudice based on race, gender, or religion is wrong the concept itself is not wrong. It’s as my father says, “All things in moderation, including moderation.” If you know you don’t like a person then don’t spend time with them. If you know you don’t like a food don’t eat it. If you don’t like going to parties, don’t. It’s simple.

Prejudice is not a bad thing. It is the result of learning, adapting, and adjusting your expectations. The only problem comes when you assume that you know a person by looking at them. Prejudice only becomes the grand problem that plagues our modern society when people look at each other and decide that they possess all the necessary information to claim complete understanding of that person. The solution is a simple one. Don’t disengage when presented with new information. Keep an open mind and don’t shut down if you don’t agree. How else can you ever learn anything?