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Especially if you get little kids together, there’s no difference!
They don’t notice, “My skin’s white, mine’s black,” until
somebody tells them.
But again, just as stigma is handed down from generation
to generation, your perspective on the world and on life and
on people is something that is taught to you. It’s learned
from your family, learned from the older generation, or from
advertising, from your environment. And, therefore, you
have to be able to have a wider perspective. Going back to
my questions, how has what you’ve learned from chimpanzees
impacted how you feel about people?
That we have lots of instincts. From studying the chimps
and seeing all the similarities it was obvious to me that we
have inherited aggressive tendencies. When you look around
the world, they’re everywhere. They’re not learned. They’re
just... there. You get angry. But with our brain we mostly
control them.
It’s the same as an unconscious bias – something which so
many people don’t understand, why they feel the way that
they do. Despite the fact that if you go up to someone andsay, “What you’ve just said, or the way that you’ve behaved,
is racist” – they’ll turn around and say, “I’m not a racist.”
“I’m not saying that you’re a racist, I’m just saying that your
unconscious bias is proving that, because of the way that
you’ve been brought up, the environment you’ve been brought
up in, suggests that you have this point of view – unconscious
point of view – where naturally you will look at someone in
a different way.” And that is the point at which people start
to have to understand.
Kids are taught to hate. They are actually taught to hate.
You can only be taught to hate. What can we learn from
nature? People always say, there is nature, then there is us.
But we are part of it – we are nature. Unless we acknowledge
we are part of this cycle, then we’re always going to be fighting
against it. Inevitably, because we’re so good at destruction,
we’ll end up winning and nature might end up losing.
But we won’t win. Because when nature loses, that’s the end
of us. We depend on nature, on clean air, clean water.
I always think to myself, whenever there’s another naturalCHRIS ALLERTON disaster, a huge increase in volcano eruptions or >