Why Do We Judge

I've always been interested in thinking about how other societies see American culture.  There are all the memes and stereotypes we hear about how Americans are all gun toting and morbidly obese people who are selfish and feel that all other countries are irrelevant.  This doesn't just go for America though.  Many talk about how all British people are snooty and wealthy people whose only purpose is to live until tea time.  All societies seem normal to the people living within them, but from the outside it can seem extremely unusual when shown to an observer in the right way.  This is shown very well in Horace Miner's "Body Ritual Among The Nacirema" where American society is described in a way that makes it sound primitive and repulsive.  When first reading Miner's article I did not realize that he was describing America and I was just thinking about how terrible this "tribe" seemed to be.  It is just weird to think about how the source that I was getting my information from made a normal action like brushing your teeth seem like a "ritual" that "strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting."  If the wording of just this article could do so much, it opens up the world to so many other possibilities.  The media has such a large impact on our lives that the, and they can easily manipulate the information they show us to make us believe what they want.  The government in China has been censoring any content on the internet that they do not want the public to see.  For example, any records on the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989 and the infamous "Tank Man" have been erased and are forbidden to be remembered.  The government there is only allowing the general public to see things that make them look good which is a distorted reality for the citizens. If there is such a large possibility of the information we observe to be misleading, then what can we do to get our own truth?  The only true way for someone to see the truth in something is to experience the event or situation with your own eyes and make your own judgments without the outside influence of others.  If we had been able to observe the "Nacirema" ourselves, then we would not have been as disgusted with their society as we had been while reading Miner's article.