There are a few skills that are hard-wired into the brains of infants that are so fundamental, and so critical for survival, that they’re operative from the moment of birth — if not sooner. One of them is pattern recognition, which is how infants recognize their mother’s faces. Even the youngest child is capable of matching a new stimulus with an event that’s previously established in their memory, and alter their behavior accordingly. Of course animals do the same thing.
But a funny thing happened to pattern recognition, starting around the middle of the last century. Pattern recognition transformed from a fundamental feature of human psychology to something far more sinister. To paraphrase the author Steve Sailer, a “war on noticing” commenced. Over the past several decades, we have been told that we are not allowed to notice patterns of human behavior, and if we do notice them, we must pretend that we don’t. It’s not enough to say that all men deserve equal rights under our Constitution and that all men are created in God’s image. Instead, it is now incumbent on all Americans to affirm that their past experiences and observations should have no bearing whatsoever on their current thought process or future behavior. White Americans who observed that cities were becoming much more dangerous, for example, weren’t supposed to flee to the suburbs for the safety of their families. Rather than engage in white flight, they were supposed to stay put and enjoy the fruits of diversity.
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