“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote this piece of wisdom in his Meditations in 170 AD. Nearly two thousand years later, humans still seem to not have learned much. We find ourselves in a society that frowns upon treating what’s different as lesser, yet cannot seem to stop alienating what does not match up to any preconceived standards. We despise prejudice, but fail to rid the world of it. However, is prejudice truly to be eliminated?

Prejudice is a preconceived opinion formed prior to any engagement with the object of said opinion. There is a tendency to speak of prejudice as unreasonable and unfounded, but although prejudice can indeed be unreasonable, it is quite frequently based on some sort of experience. We live our lives accumulating experiences — willingly or unwillingly — which we then use to face the future. What we do, hear, read and live through, then, clings to us.

When I was a toddler, for example, I reached for a scented candle and touched the flame. The next time I crossed paths with fire I remembered the burn mark on my little finger and knew better than to touch it. This sort of conditioning can, however, go both ways. A few years later, in fact, I tried drinking hot milk from a mug for the first time, spilled it all over myself, and didn’t drink out of a mug again until the first grade, mistakenly believing mugs were to be feared. Either way, the fact that we stand before our circumstances, judging them based on background, which may or may not be constructive.

But this does not make us narrow-minded fools; it makes us human.

What turns a human into a narrow-minded fool is a greater attachment to prejudice than to reality. We try to dehumanize ourselves pretending it’s possible and even expected to approach life as blank slates, but that’s ridiculous. The issue is not our inability to eliminate our preconceived notions, but that we love what’s in our head more than the truth.

A lot of society has lost the zeal to discover whether our thoughts match up with the world that surrounds us. We have become presumptuous enough to believe that either reality is a threat to our ideas or that our ideas are reality.

What we should ultimately be focusing on, then, is not keeping ourselves from making judgments, but approaching life with questions and be open to who and what is actually out there in order to reach the truth.

Letizia Mariani can be reached at mari8259@stthomas.edu