>>Not so much superiority as wilful ignorance or exclusion of the rest. Just look at any list of best 100 or 1000 of anything, or how things get named. It always gets composed by cultural proximity first, then if there's room for more, maybe we'll remember some of the outside.
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>Wilful ignorance? Rather, I think it is linked to a basic instinct: Our original brain was built to have personal relationships with approx. 150 others, to the max. An essential part of a meaningful relationship is an inventarisation of the degree to which the other can be trusted. There are millions of other people who, in theory, we could fall in love with. Nevertheless, we stick to the one we already found and skip all those theoretical others. We attach to a very limited number of people because that's how our brains work best. And that's the essence of ethnocentricism and dicrimination, AND of racism, I think.

I'd buy that if it worked for cultures outside of the western circle the same way, but it doesn't.