Why is society so unwilling to accept the unfamiliar?
I am only guessing, but it could harken back to the days of when we were cavemen. At that time we were surrounded by many predators and other dangers, and the unfamiliar could be deadly. We would have learnt to be wary of things we did not understand or had little previous knowledge of, because those things could put us in danger. Another idea would be that unfamiliar things don’t fit into our world view, and that confuses us or makes us anxious. As we go about the world we collect packets of information called schema. They contain details on things like how to behave in a restaurant, or what the colours of a traffic like mean. If we learn as children that “boys don’t wear dresses” and then we see a cross-dresser in adult life, that flies in the face of what we know to be true about the world. Some people can’t handle that and it makes them uncomfortable. Why does it effect some more than others? Well, perhaps some people have memories attached to those ideas that make them stronger th
