Growing up I was always an optimist. I thought that eventually, if someone was vaguely intelligent, they wouldn't be racist. My rationale was that racism was dumb and there was no rational reason for it. It followed that even if someone was brought up to believe racist things, that they would eventually 'figure it out'.
Slowly the penny dropped that this was not the case. You could get very intelligent people like Wouter Basson, nicknamed "Dr Death" for his alleged actions in Apartheid South Africa, who was clearly very intelligent and racist.
I continue to come across people on a regular basis who seem to ardently believe things that to me seem incomprehensibly ridiculous. As Schulz says in "Being Wrong", we don't know what it feels like to be wrong. In fact being wrong feels exactly the same as the feeling of being right!
The thing I think about often is which of my beliefs fall into that category. Where is the way I think inconsistent, and when will I figure this out. What is it that years (or months or days) from now, I will look back in astonishment that I believed what I believed?
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