French Stereotypes, Truth or Myths? (7 of 7)

Wrap up:

“A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.” Martin H. Fischer

Hopefully you enjoyed this series of articles and that you learnt a few things. Of course, it is a bonus if some of it put a smile on your face, it feels like opportunities to smile are getting more and more scarce these days. Anyway, not the topic; not yet anyway ??

The whole point, beyond the fun factor, was to give a bit of perspective, and as I was progressing in writing these articles, I realized a few things I’d like to share:

Everybody is biased: if you go back to the first article, I wrote I would look at all this through an unbiased lens… Those who know me are laughing already: impossible for me, especially when it comes to France. Fair enough. However, believe me or not, I really did try.

but looking at the articles again, it is a big fail. Through the series, there’s a clear increase in the use of words like “us”, “we”, “our” … clearly highlighting how along the way, I definitely lost impartiality and got overtaken by my own biases.

In other words, it’s a bit like if a rugby referee would end up playing with one of the team at the end of the match. OK, not quite a good example, we (France) have been playing 15 Vs 16 for years every time we had an Anglo-Saxon ref. #controversy??

Keep a neutral observer stance is hard and requires significant efforts to always step back, reflect and re-think.

“It's human nature to make the complex manageable and determine things that fit your conclusions. That's bias.” Richard Burr

The power and dangers of internet: as you can guess, I did not go to a library to find all these sources. I haven’t set foot in a library in years. When everything is one click away, finding information has never been that easy.

However, it does not come without risk or effort: you can find everything and anything on the web, opposing theories, point of views, each well documented leading to more confusion than clarity when you try to make up your mind or something. You have then 2 options:

-         Review various sources, compare and decide for yourself what to believe. It is a bit like averaging a series of numbers, only trickier. This is the way I proceeded, mostly.

 -         Start with a strong belief and simply look at sources that confirm your theory while ignoring all the rest. Nothing new here, but with the plethora of information available today, the danger is that you will find great arguments supporting some fallacious ideas. An extreme illustration of this principle is the movie “thank you for smoking”, where the key protagonists is just great at winning an argument by any means necessary.

 And I have to say I’m guilty here. Not much, but because of my biases, I did, at times, favoured one source over another… But I will not say which ??…

In this particular case, I suppose no harm is done, it’s most of all for fun, but in other cases there can be consequences.

“For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.” Janet Frame

The most important thing I realized I suppose is that I really enjoyed it. As such, and I apologize in advance, chances are I will keep on writing…

 “Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions.” Paulo Coelho

 Till the next article.