These aberrations of humanity have culminated in humans acting inhumanely to other humans; for example, racism and prejudice that leads to hatred and people committing atrocities on other people as in the case of the Nazis committing genocide against the Jews, the Rwandan Hutus committing genocide against the Tutsis, the Sudanese Arabs committing genocide against indigenous Africans—the so-called “Black Africans”, the atrocities of the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic slave trades, Africans facilitating the enslavement of fellow Africans by actively participating in the kidnapping and selling of other Africans in the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trade, the ignoble apartheid regimes in American South and South Africa. The aberrations of humanity are primarily why peace between Arabs and Jews remains elusive, it is why the Iraqi insurgents are killing their own people in the most gruesome manner, and why the Hindus in India have treated and are treating the so-called “untouchables” so wickedly. It is also the reason for the mistreatment of women and children in many cultures around the world.

It would be simplistic to attribute all these aberrations of humanity to a single cause as many have done, most notably Sir Arthur Keith, and it is certainly not the reason Keith presented—amity towards insiders and enmity towards outsiders as an evolutionary disposition. However, the cause is mainly rooted in people’s definition of other people and the definition of values by which people operate and act towards other people.

Definition creates perception and perception often leads people to act in aberrant ways, from the suppression of conscience to the perilous premise of meaningless self-assurance in propping self-destructive and even nihilistic tendencies, from sexism to narcissism, fascism to racism, from abortion to euthanasia. Definition positions for exploitation and destruction, people who have not acquired the ability to assert their rights, those who have lost the ability to assert their rights and people who in the face of identity crisis engage in irrational definition of themselves as a protest or rebellious action. Definition underlies all self-inflicted calamities that have befallen the human race; it has been the tool for portraying people and values, and subjugating conscience with respect to people and values as to commit acts that would otherwise be inhibited and prohibited by human conscience. From the origin of perception as a concept, to the dynamics of perception as social expressions, from the instruments and agents of perception to the impacts of perception in society; the book not only provides a necessary foundation for a better understanding of the subject, it essentially leads readers to the next step in the dialogue—a position for articulating the proper response.