No, I think pretty much everyone does it.
I guess I’m just a contrarian. When someone gives me their version of ‘everyone does it’, I immediately want to do the opposite!
Yeah, everyone does that.
( I’m not even really joking.)
This. A former friend was constantly justifying his bad behavior (affairs while he was married, stealing from work) with “everyone does that.” If you claimed you didn’t, you were just lying, in his opinion. His life became more and more of a shambles and it was so unfair because he wasn’t doing anything everyone else wasn’t doing. :rolleyes:
Unfortunately, he was just an extreme case of a pretty common outlook.
The difference, though, is that racism (or, actually, prejudicial discrimination) has damaging effects that ripple through society while a brief lapse in hygiene is pretty benign. People aren’t getting shot for knocking on the wrong door because the resident (or visitor) has a bit of spinach in his teeth but because that visitor bore indicators of a nationality or ethnicity which the resident hated and unthinkingly acted upon that hatred.
I was reading this thread late last night and only realized this morning (while compiling quotes for my response) that these two are from the same person.
The conflation is valid enough in that there’s a whole field of sociological inquiry that is only now getting media attention (hype?). This is a facet of the sociology of power, with questions like “How is it that the majority of people able to afford illegal drugs are caucasian but the majority of people busted for drug abuse are non-caucasian?” and “Why does Mary get scolded in class for interrupting the teacher when Jim gets an immediate answer after blurting out a question?”
However valid, these questions seem a bit of a side-track from the main question.
As for the OP, the “everyone does it” phrase is either a fallacy of hasty generalization – assuming from a limited sample that the entire population is the same - based on a sample of one (-self), or a bandwagon argument as Ranger Jeff pointed out.
My mother carefully taught me to never ever deal in such hyperbole.
For the former excuse, she would say, “No, not everyone. Lots of people, perhaps, but the better of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.”
For the bandwagon plea, she would say, “Who says it’s ‘everyone’? And who cares anyway? If ‘everyone’ was jumping off a cliff, would you jump too?” and later, after I had learned enough history, “You know, ‘everyone’ was joining the Hitler Youth groups, too. Do you just want to blindly join everything?”
–G!
Ignorance of the law excuses no man;
not that all men know the law;
but because ‘tis an excuse every man will plead,
and no man can tell how to confute him.
[COLOR=White]…–John Selden (1584-1654)
…posthumously published in Table Talk, 1689[/COLOR]