You All Judge Books by Covers

You could have learned this when you were three:

"Don't judge a book by its cover" we nodded along like we got the message as they told us this as children, before we'd even read a book, perhaps, but did we get the message? I know I did but others are only faking it, it turns out; they assent to the proposition, but do they judge books based on their contents? No! They don't even read books, let alone anyone's soul.

For to judge a book by its cover is part and parcel with a whole worldview and approach; I watch y'all do it every day:

You judge a link by its title

You judge a person by their face, or by their clothes, or by their body, or their voice

You judge a statement by its speaker

You judge music by its notes

You judge a chess game by its outcome

You judge the whole by its parts

You judge a conversation by its platform

You judge an argument by its conclusion

You judge someone's character by their company, desecrating freedom of association

You judge members by their groups

You judge groups by their members

You judge presents by their futures

You judge futures by their pasts

You judge races by their crimes

You judge nations by their sports, or by their exports

You judge romance by its dollar-value

Reductiveness and prejudice go hand-in-hand for when we literally ‘pre-judge’ we ‘reduce’ a book to its cover. It is this literal sense of 'prejudice' we must have in our sights in war, for it is not merely racial prejudice (which is possible independent of racism, defined as systemic), but all forms of prejudice, or ‘conclusion-jumping’, which must be opposed, for they are only different in how they are directed—the common psychological mechanism is one-and-the-same: jumping to conclusions, a form of laziness at best, merely enabling hate, or at its worst, hate's prime mover: skipping steps in your reasoning when it benefits the in-group, like a freebie; being stupid can be weaponized and symptomizes priviledge and entitlement.

This common psychological mechanism also links the various forms of social justice under anarchism: feminism fights jumping to conclusions about gendered power, anti-racism fights jumping to conclusions about racial power, anarchism fights jumping to conclusions about power generally, and logic just fights jumping to conclusions simpliciter, so math will make you moral, do your homework. Start HERE.

To see how various movements unite under anarchism see my first article here:

Also see the history of “Anarcha-Feminism”.

Now in case you don’t know how to do this yet: