Dehumanization In Charles Kinnane's The Human Experience

By Kierkegaard’s standards, the lack of loving your neighbor as yourself may be the root of the problem of dehumanization. In Charles Kinnane’s The Human Experience, the audience is introduced to a homeless woman living on the streets. She tells the story of a time when, while living on the streets with four dogs, people felt the need to give the animals a place to stay so they wouldn’t freeze on the streets. The people stood around and made sure that the dogs had a home to go to, but paid no attention to their fellow human being. They left her and took the dogs. This is an example of not loving your neighbor as yourself. The people who took time out of their days to ensure that the dogs were safe, may have been doing something good, but they did not extend that good to their neighbor. At this …show more content…
Now there’s no telling what may have been going through their minds when they saw the homeless woman - maybe they assumed she was a drug addict and therefore deserved her homelessness, maybe she was too dirty so they didn’t want her in their homes, or maybe they were just so used to seeing homelessness that it didn’t phase them - but what these people did was forget that the woman was their fellow sister; a clear part of our collective species. Her circumstance became the only thing that they saw; they saw her has a homeless woman, and not as a human being. This is how dehumanization begins, in my opinion. When you begin to separate human beings by their appearance or status or race - when you separate the poor from the rich, the able-bodied from the disabled, black from white - you give those differences a title. Once that title is given, it becomes easier to make a decision on whether those differences really matter and unfortunately for mankind, it seems like our differences are the only things that matter anymore. Pretty Little Liars is a Freeform original television series loosely based on the book series of the same