Discrimination - A Dirty Word?

There is a quality of reasoning that everyone who reasons, values highly. But a term that signifies this invaluable quality has been hi-jacked by pop culture as a pejorative, denigrating term.

This intellectual activity is the ability to separate things, concepts, ideas from each other. It is a discerning quality, we all have to differentiate things.

Whenever you separate good from bad, useful from useless, harmful from innocuous, you are discriminating.

Discrimination is one term we use to signify this quality of separating things out. We all discriminate all the time.

Yet, a word search in pop media, vox pop, debating, and even policy and law, will reveal that the term "discrimination" is bad, is misused to signify a kind of close-minded intolerance or bigotry.

As thinkers, We need to take this term back and re-educate the ignorant masses.

Discrimination is vital for happiness, security, understanding and effectiveness in all activities.

Yet, "Don't discriminate!" is the mantra of our age.

"Discriminating against people is bad." is the new morality.

Why does the term "discrimination" get such a bad rap?

How this pejorative use of "discrimination" came about what was through the recent phenomenon of the media sound-bite.

A sound-bite is a lazy abridgment of a complex issue: it is used by the media, marketing companies, advertising industry and politicians, and therefore used in policy speak, as politicians anticipate their sentences of policy being dumbed down to a phrase - a sound-bite.

So, the original language used by a politcian would have been something like, "Our society should strive against the negative discrimination against people based on their race or creed."

The media would have sound-bitten this statement into something like, "Politician fights racial discrimination."

It doesn't help when the UN and governments use the same lazy sound-bites, especially in the titles of legislation and policy, such as quoting the "Anti-Discrimination laws".

We want to remind everyone that discrimination is a valuable intellectual tool, uniquely human that names an intellectual activity of separating the complex into the simple and revealing thus the key differences between things.

Citizens of the world. Discriminate!