Inherent evil, or just the way we are wired?

I am prejudiced.

There. I said it. My heart feels cleansed.

I do not like football. I do not attend games. I do not paint my face in My Team's Colors. Unless there are alternative reasons to hang out with them (members of my church, business contacts, like that) I do not hob-nob with football fans. It is not an interest of mine...I find it boring.

The evil part is that they do not hob-nob with me, either. All the enlightenment they could receive about Cold War Era science fiction, anime, the Printing of Shirts, my Political Views...well if they can't be bothered to better themselves...Aardvark's Burden.

An anecdote regarding the Way We May Be Wired:

During the filming of Planet of the Apes in 1967, Charlton Heston noted “an instinctive segregation on the set. Not only would the apes eat together, but the chimpanzees ate with the chimpanzees, the gorillas ate with the gorillas, the orangutans ate with the orangutans, and the humans would eat off by themselves. It was quite spooky.”

James Franciscus noticed the same thing filming Beneath the Planet of the Apes in 1969. “During lunch I looked up and realized, ‘My God, here is the universe,’ because at one table were all the orangutans eating, at another table were the apes, and at another table were the humans. The orangutan characters would not eat or mix with the ape characters, and the humans wouldn’t sit down and eat with any one of them.
“I remember saying, ‘Look around — do you realize what’s happening here? This is a little isolated microcosm of probably what’s bugging the whole world. Call it prejudice or whatever you want to call it. Whatever’s different is to be shunned or it’s frightening or so forth.’ Nobody was intermingling, even though they were all humans underneath the masks. The masks were enough to bring out our own little genetic natures of fear and prejudice. It was startling.”

(From Joe Russo and Larry Landsman, Planet of the Apes Revisited, 2001.)

I believe that Franciscus is overstating the issue, echoing his own prejudice. What he saw was not based upon fear or bigotry (which term more accurately portrays his distaste for what he observed, I think) What he saw was not shunning, it was grouping. The chimps were not hooting and throwing... tapioca pudding at the orangutans, nor did the gorillas throw commissary furniture at the humans. The human tendency, prosthetic makeup or no, is to hang out with those most like themselves. This is visceral. Families, clans, tribes, countries, ethnicities...when the Omicronians arrive to enlighten us, well, they will likely sit to themselves. Hairless apes go against the grain for them, and well, those creepy mouth tentacles are off-putting to us. Or me. The animated vermicelli thing is not conducive to my good appetite.

After awhile, it will become a badge of honor for an Omicronian to say "Humans?" Why, yes, some of my best friends...."