Hey! Look at your face, looks like a criminal.

Every act that has a polish of force has the potential of being a threat at any time. Anything that is achieved by force shall build up a reservoir of a dormant power to counter it. The countering power may not arise now, but it shall build, and it is also subject to mitigation by other means. As force is used further, the countering force shall as well accrue.

People hail science to always be away from the usage of force but it has done a lot with force, but what is beautiful in science is that it allows internal modification and it corrects itself as it advances. I am not talking about the realm of physics where people measure force, but I am talking about force used upon humans while using science as the support of that action. Actually racism in its most heinous forms has been performed by the eugenicists who built up their ideas upon social Darwinism, fully against the empathetic nature of Charles Darwin. Though this is not my topic.

Physiognomy which is the analysis of a person’s character based on his external appearance has been something that drew a lot of intellectuals a long while ago. Yes, a very long while ago. In the 19th century, there was a criminologist who was so determined that he shall come up with the typical criminal face. He aimed to then publish his work for everyone so people should be more cautious as they meet people if they tend to look like the prototype of criminality. By that people could also deduce the faces that are more acceptable and avoid criminals. HOW BIASED COULD THAT BE? He gathered the photos of criminals and used a way to overlap them. As he did that, he unknowingly increased the symmetry of the created face and when he showed it to people for them to provide their impression about the photos, they would say “Wow, this person is good looking”.

Besides this conclusion and how things went on, we realize that the ones who were into science, at least if we define science as a set of observations recorded to build knowledge and by that create means to function better in the world, were the ones who wanted to come up with very dangerous and vacuous conclusions. However, it is well known that symmetry is a sign of beauty and our primitive minds feel that people with symmetrical faces are healthier, even babies, by the age of two months, prefer to look at people with more symmetrical faces compared to others.

Till today though, at least in the areas away from science, we find many people who conclude that someone is bad or good just based on their external appearance. Here, I am not pointing at the attitude of the person, neither the behavior of the person, nor the different facial expressions or the tone of the voice. The matter addressed here is just the grimace of a person with no dynamic alteration, but as it is still, and unmoving.

If there was a system that was built upon this assessment, what kind of society would we have? Actually, we do assess people upon their grimaces but we don’t have the right to assign someone the tag of criminality but if there was a governmental system that would approve such vacuous introspection, it would even push people to be more superficial than how they are. It would create humans who are so on the surface that many actions would be altered just based on that. Happily it was science itself that showed that such thing is utter bullshit. Utter bullshit.