this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Unpopular Opinion

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I was reading about Mel Gibson's anti-semitic rants, and his apology about being drunk* when I remembered this meme. I agree with the meme, that our brains tend to feed us what we've heard from our environment, but our conscious mind overrides that with our processed thoughts.

People use "he didn't mean it, he was drunk/high" as an excuse for racist/misogynist/whateverist comments. The response is typically "you don't become racist when drunk, you just drop your inhibitions and reveal who you are."

But if you agree with the First Thought meme, what if being impaired isn't revealing what you really think, but is preventing you from thinking at all, and just getting stuck on your conditioned response?

*Gibson is just an example. This post is not about litigating whether he personally is racist, but about this sort of behavior in general.

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[–] waterore@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

The first thought is the conditioning done by life, the second thought is the conditioning done by oneself as we grow to become the person we want to be.

I needed this, thank you.

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not following you. What you think and what you say or do are entirely different, right? We think all kinds of things very quickly about all kinds of topics, and just as a practical measure we can only say or do do a small fraction of those.

So right now I'm not seeing the Mel Gibson connection, because that was a claim about his actions.

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[–] Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 4 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Being conditioned to think racist thoughts is essentially what racism is. Nobody chooses to be racist - you become one as a result of your genes and environment. That pretty much applies to your entire personality. I'm more in the camp that believes drunk people are just being honest. But I'm also in the no-free-will camp, so I don't guilt people for being who they are. That doesn't mean I like them or want to be around them, but I don't act as if they could have been any different. Still, that’s not to say people can’t change - they can, if they want to. That’s the key difference between what you want and what you want to want.

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