Rebel/Conspirator

Let's just get the preliminaries out of the way: generalizations are bad. I say this not because I'm planning on making any generalizations and I don't want people to think I think that it's good. I say this not because I'm trying to prove a point about the self-reflexive nature of that statement. I'm saying this because that's basically what all of what I'm about to say boils down to, and if you just feel like stopping here, you'll have received the basic gist, which is, for those of you who came in late: generalizations are bad.

Now, let's work from the general to the specific. First off, while all generalizations are bad, generalizations about groups of people are particularly bad. So, for instance, to say that all Column A are Epithet B would be inexcusable. I could give specific examples, but why bother, as I'm sure you can think of some yourselves.

Having said that classes of people shouldn't be generalized, it is further ridiculous to believe that there is an exemplar individual within a class of people at whom one can point and say, "That individual possesses all of the traits of the class." That's just another form of generalization, I think you'll agree. From that, we can say that no two people can be held up as a smaller subset of any group of people which possesses all the traits of that larger group, and if that's the case, then one can say that the only subset of a set which can be held up as a generalization is the entire set. Thus, no individual or smaller group may be held as an exemplar of any group containing more people than that individual or group (in fact, philosophically I think there's a case to be made that you can't even hold up an entire group as an exemplar of itself, but that's not the point here).

What I'm saying, in plainer terms, is that just because individuals in a group possess traits, it doesn't follow that all individuals in that group possess those same traits. Or, to put in another way, just because someone in a group does bad things doesn't mean that the entire group should be held up as bad.

Sometimes there are cases where an entire group does bad things, and thus can be said to be bad. But until you can verify the individual badness of each group member, you can't assume, based on a sampling of the group, that all members of the group are bad.

Usually, though, that's what people do. They point to a group, say that members of that group are doing bad things, and it reflects poorly on that group. But consider: it doesn't work the other way around. For instance, there were some Nazis (and I use this because it's the obvious choice, plus I'm using the term "Nazi" to mean members of the Nazi Party in Germany between 1932 and 1945, not "fascist") who tried to kill Hitler. Does that reflect well on Nazism? Should we say, "Obviously, Nazis are misunderstood."

So why is it that when a member (or members) of a large group does something bad, something which isn't part of a philosophy espoused by that large group (killing Hitler certainly wasn't a party platform for the Nazis), we automatically assume that all members of that group agree and also that there must be some hidden agenda of that group which this bad thing is bearing out?

Think about it. If you view individuals acting against a group's stated purpose as rebels when they do something you like, why should it be any different if they do something you don't like? Not all environmentalists are terrorists, not all pro-life people are doctor-murderers, not all conservatives are evil, and not all liberals are Communists. In point of fact, you have to judge things by themselves, not representatives of them. It's fine to not like a group's stated aims, but if a member of that group does something outside the stated aims of that group, whether you like it or not, it doesn't reflect on the rest of the group at all.