So barbaric

The main point being stressed by the essay is the personal bias we have for ourselves and customs, and that by using reason instead of ethnocentric tendencies to view others can yield surprising results. He talks about the foreign culture and how their traditions are entirely different than the ones that he is accustomed with. They drink warm drinks, fight naked, and eat their prisoners after taking good care of them. His instincts are to be appalled by this tradition, however after analyzing it through unbiased reason, he comes to a different conclusion. He reflects that this practice is less barbaric than the practices of his home land, where they torture the living and hurt their prisoners. Eventually, he comes to the conclusion that even though what they do sounds more scandalous, the so called "barbarians" are actually less barbaric than the society he is familiar with. He also points out how bias many culture are to any culture that differs from their own norms, and how skewed this can be as well. The Greeks refereed to any culture or country that wasn't their own as "barbaric," even if they didn't completely agree with this standpoint upon further analysis. The main point of this essay was cultural bias, and how our norms and values are incredibly subjective when comparing others to ourselves. Actions and customs that appear deviant at face value can actually be less hostile than expected when you use reason instead of bias to analyze them.