The Only Three Distinctions Between People

It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and where they belong, a yearning we have given shape to in laws and labels, weights and balances, hierarchies and categories. It has served us well, this instinct to categorize in order to contain, giving us music, the laws of planetary motion, and democracy. But it also pulsates beneath every ism we have ever… read article