are not necessarily evil. funny how the most progressive among us forget that sometimes
A great source of human misery is the tendency to judge "the foreign" as somehow dangerous or lesser than ourselves. It makes "the judge" unhappy and of course, it is worse for "the judged."
This is not to say that we suspend our critical faculties and choose never to take the measure of a person or thing. But we should be alert to our knee-jerk tendencies to see in someone different, "the other." Even if judgment is called for, it demands evidence and thought.
If I am to be of any use to my fellow human beings, I must be prepared to listen to them. Indeed, it is the human beings who most irritate me that I must listen to most closely. Not because they are right and I am wrong, but because they might be right and I might be wrong. And of course, if I am right, how can they ever agree with me if I'm not listening and talking to them?
I am not interested in remaining comfortably uninformed, steeping in my own bath water. It doesn't do me or anyone else any good, so far as I can see.
True also if someone makes a statement that runs counter to my values. I can pretend they don't exist or try to crush their speech but if I do, am I not less of a person for doing so? Yet we do rush to silence those who make us uncomfortable, those we think "wrong", all the time. Even when someone posits an argument for the sake of argument, and asks for alternative opinion.
The only choices aside from communication, are isolation or war. The only outcomes of isolation and war are stupidity and destruction. Personally, I recommend against them. Let's talk and listen, let's irritate the hell out of each other, let's learn and teach. That's what peace and freedom look like.