© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
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Beliefs are as essential to life as air and food. We have to hold them. And if we do, we run the risk of holding beliefs that qualify as prejudices. The world “prejudice” comes from the Latin praejudicium: judicium meaning “to judge,” with the prefix pre- meaning “before.” The word means: “1) a judgment or opinion formed before the facts are known; preconceived idea, favorable or, more usually, unfavorable. 2) a judgment or opinion held in disregard of facts that contradict it; unreasonable bias.” We use the word prejudice mostly in regard to race and ethnicity, but it affects a lot of our thinking about other matters great and small.

If two identical twin sisters passed you on the street and one was wearing a business suit and the other a pair of skin-tight leopard-skin pants, would your impression of them be the same? Of course not. Some people would be put off by the skin-tight leopard skin pants, others by the formality of the business suit. What if both were dressed in business suits but one was smoking a cigarette? If one wore glasses would you think she was smarter? Many people would. What if they dressed identically in all respects but you learned that one was a lawyer and the other a doctor? Exhaustive studies have been done with these kinds of clues. Small signals about people in dress, body language and speech create large changes in our perceptions. Where and how we develop these attitudes is a mystery.

What is not a mystery is that we have thousands of subtle likes and dislikes, sensibilities and sensitivities, and these are nothing but prejudices. If we react so strongly to tiny differences in people, how are we supposed to act to big differences—for example, when someone is from a different racial, cultural or ethnic background? As if they are exactly like us? That's crazy. We're humans, not machines or saints.

We all have prejudices. The important thing is now whether or not we have them, but what we do with them. Having preconceived notions, right or wrong, about an ethnic group may qualify as prejudice, but that's different from racism or hatred. Racism and hatred take a person's prejudices and close them in static boxes so tight that they are magnified into something truly dangerous. Trans-Biological Kinesis takes prejudices and exposes them to the air of reason and creativity. They might not die, but they become less important in the scheme of things. Positive creative factors push them out of the limelight. The differences remain, but when you reach into the heart you find commonalities that dwarf those differences. If you've ever had the experience of positively relating to people from a radically different culture than your own, you realize that you can build bridges with people even though you and they have major differences in culture and lifestyle.

To get into this area a little deeper, let's move away from race and ethnicity to some of the more common prejudices that may hold us back without our recognizing them. Here's a true story I recently heard of a mother holding and showing deep prejudices for or against her own children, based strictly on the profession they chose. Of her three sons, she was most proud of the one who became a doctor. The second son became a dentist: good but not quite as good as a doctor. The third son, according to his own mother, was just a teacher. I've been a patient of both the doctor and the dentist. They certainly knew their fields. I never met the “teacher.” But I learned later, that after this woman died, the “teacher,” actually a full professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University, was awarded the Nobel Prize.

In another telling instance, I arrived at a Rotary club to give a speech, which required that I first help myself to a buffet lunch. I placed a ham steak on my plate, then ladled out some creamed spinach, which ended up completely covering the meat. As I was walking back to my table, I heard one woman whisper to another, using a cynical tone, “oh, I see our speaker is a vegetarian.” If I actually had been a vegetarian, I might have been annoyed, but as I was about to enjoy eating the meat, I ticked one off for my prejudice file.

Exercise: Prejudice

Using the material in the previous section, take a look at some of your prejudices (both seemingly important and apparently trivial) and answer these questions for each.

• How strong is this prejudice? How deeply ingrained in my makeup is it?

• Does this prejudice affect my personal human progress or is it relatively harmless?

• In the same way, does this particular prejudice affect my interactions with others?

• If the answer to either of the above two questions is that the prejudice is potentially harmful or obstructive, how can I work to change the prejudice or enlarge my perspective so as to make the prejudice less harmful?