"That guy just looks like a creep."

Do you ever look at someone like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, or Donald Sterling and think, “Man, that guy just looks like a creep.”

Oh, you do? Well, congratulations then, because you’ve screwed up in the worst possible way. This kind of reaction misses the point by the widest mark imaginable. Remember the reason for the opprobrium leveled at these men. Recall the thing that we’re upset at them about. If you were to summarize, it would be something like: “We’re not supposed to judge people based on their outward appearance.” That is, you’re not supposed to make assumptions about someone based on how they look. Appearance doesn’t tell you what you need to know about a person’s moral worth, or value as an employee, or inner-most thoughts and secrets. It’s not much good to say, “Oh, it’s okay. Because I know from another source of information that these guys are really creeps. I’m just building on that starting point.” Imagine someone remarking on what a horrible person Michael Vick is, or Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, or Kim Jong Un, and then spewing a racial epithet at them. “Oh, no, it’s okay. I’m judging them based on their actual actions, and just building on that starting point.” I don’t think so. 

I get daily e-mails from the Washington Post that list various stories about “bad people” along with photos that make them look as ugly and unsympathetic as possible. They can’t just show a random pic of Trump. They have to show him with the worst possible grimace, or the most sinister-looking sneer. Using a person’s appearance to reinforce the fact that you don’t like them strikes me as being gratuitous and incredibly self-indulgent. It’s almost cheating, appealing to people’s visceral disgust reflex rather than appealing to a rational argument. I’m not just picking on the Washington Post, either. Every major media outlet does this, and I see this kind of garbage on my Facebook feed daily. The problem isn’t with the media, but with the consumers of media who eat this kind of thing up. (As I open my e-mail just now, I just got my daily list of headlines from the Post. I see two more photos of Trump. One looks roughly neutral, the other looks like it was deliberately chosen to make him look despicable. It would be interesting if they did a story that randomly chose a picture of Trump from an unbiased sample of images, or one that cycled through various pictures every few seconds.)

To be clear, this post is written partially to myself. I once caught myself thinking, “Man, Sterling just looks like a creep” and then, “Wait a minute…doesn’t thinking that completely freaking miss the point!?” Judging someone based on their appearance is a natural human reaction, and such judgments aren’t always inaccurate. But we should certainly strive to suppress these judgments. We should augment them with relevant information. We should also strive to discard “information” that viscerally confirms things we already want to believe.