I think you guys said it before me, that mass generalizations are usually false. It just takes one counter example to prove a mass generalization false, and usually that counter-example is readily available.

So why do so many people believe mass generalizations? I suspect it has something to do with mass generalizations being told from above. In fact, I'm tempted to believe that lazy people don't come up with their own generalizations, but simply accept the generalizations that other people tell them.

It's so much easier to just believe what everyone else is saying, because then you don't have to get off your ass to actually validate the concepts or examine them yourself. It's the leaders who actually figure things out for themselves that create mass generalizations that favor their policy decisions. And why not? As long as the massess will allow it, the leaders will take advantage of the situation.

Iraq anyone?

In my opinion, society isn't bad, stupid, or even lame at all. Society has made the greatest advances in culture, humanity, technology, life span... almost everything you can think of, society has improved it. As for the majority of people in society, however, me thinks they're just lazy and want the government to do everything for them. Not all societies are like this, though. It cycles.

I think its right to want the government to "do everthing for then", except, off course, for personal matters. What is wrong is to not watch over the government and not press it to make what it is supposed to do.

Mass generalizations are one of those few things we can belch forth that are nealy always guaranteed to be incorrect. It's a snap judgment - that dissolves individuality - to lay blame or neatly pigeon-hole behavior, or 'things'.

I think it a human tendency that comes from our need to 'explain'. The sheer complexity of the task - to understand why X-People do <THAT> - is overwhelming, yet the ego endures and refuses to simply admit the obvious: That I don't know.

There are probably a thousand other reasons why. The point: Generalizations are an understandable, but fundamentally flawed, way of categorizing aspects of life, people and things. The extent to which we use them is simultaneously the extent to which we blur the complexity of our world.

Thanks