Why are some people more racist than others? Amazingly it turns out that it may be a side effect of open-mindedness.

People are to a large extent born with different psychological personality traits or develop them at a very early age. Psychologists have identified five major traits, one of which is open-mindedness. It is normally associated with many positive qualities such as creativity and adaptability, but also some negative such as a risk of mental instability and psychosis.

Borders and Individuality

But what is it? It is useful to think of a mind as having borders and walls. We use those boundaries to distinguish one thing from another. This thing over here is a dog and that thing over there is a cat. Borders.

We can place humans on a spectrum of the degree of borders in the mind. Close-minded people have thicker and more impenetrable borders in their mind, whereas the open-minded tend to be thin-walled. Information flows more freely in their minds.

As you may have guessed, conservatives tend to be on the close-minded side of the spectrum. They like walls. Liberals are on the opposite end. At the extreme close-minded end of the spectrum, one can find some forms of autism. Similarly, at the opposite extreme, we find the psychotic – people whose borders are so frail that they cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Highly thick-bordered minds tend not to have a flood of associations. It makes their minds very precise, almost like a computer, but also less capable of making abstractions. If they see a black person who robs a store, and then later see another black person, they are less likely to associate the two.

Borders in the mind make them see people more as separate individuals than as members of a group.

Group Think

Open-minded people do the opposite. Associations spread like a tsunami through their minds. One thing more easily reminds them of another. Therefore, when they see a black man robbing a store they will be more likely to associate the next black man they see with crime than the close-minded.

The open-minded will, therefore, tend to see people more as members of a group than as individuals. Consider the example of music. Many pop songs are made based on the same chord progressions, and the open-minded therefore often quickly grow bored with this genre because they fail to hear them as individual songs with unique characteristics. Let’s call them song racists, if you like.

This also explains why open-minded people tend towards collectivism. Racism is to a large extent a phenomenon of the left because liberals tend to be more open-minded.

Mexican Rapists

This may strike you as odd and the opposite of what you have been taught. Aren’t the conservatives the racists? Don’t they want to build that wall and keep those Mexicans out? If you listen carefully to President Donald Trump’s infamous Mexican rapist speech, he listed what kind of Mexicans he wants to keep out. He started by saying “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” He then pointed to specific Hispanic individuals in the audience and said: “They’re not sending you.”

However, since leftists tend to think in terms of groups, all they could hear him say was that all Mexicans are rapists – every single one of them. Because to them, all Mexicans are the same. There are no Mexican individuals, only their ethnicity.

Conservatives, who have lots of borders in their minds, didn’t hear that. They were able to distinguish between good and bad Mexicans, and far more rotten apples cross the borders illegally than through legal immigration, so they want to build a wall.

Like a Dog

Consider a more recent example. When Trump called Omarosa Manigault a dog, the entire left-wing media immediately thought that he was being racist. Why? To the left, Omarosa is not an individual with unique characteristics, but merely a member of her racial group. Associations spread like wildfire in their open minds, which led them to the conclusion that Trump must have been mean to her because she was black. Fortunately, we have people like Ben Shapiro to clear up the confusion.

An open mind is great, but it comes at a price. Those who are on the left should learn to know the dangers that their personality poses. They are quick to reduce individuals to their groups, and they falsely project their proclivity onto the right.