The Human Duty to Think
What?I see these ideas of thinking, not thinking/following orders/not questioning authority and the default to easy answers playing out in our society as leading to a sense of sameness throughout all people in the society itself. If everyone, as a society, follows orders of those above without question and don’t think for themselves, everyone is the same and there’s nothing that makes us different. No one would have their own thoughts, the thing that makes each and every one of us different because no two people can think exactly the same. Like Arendt said, thinking is “deeply intertwined with the world, with the flux of world changes. It was an active thinking.” So how could two people possibly have the same two lines of thought when no two people have the same experience with the world?
Now, I understand the role of thinking, questioning, and forming a critical analysis as part of my responsibility in the world because the world itself is meant to be questioned and critically analyzed. Like I said earlier, if we just take the world as we are given, don’t question what we are told and don’t think for ourselves, we become one unthinking person, with nothing separating the thoughts of us from the thoughts of every other person around us. If we just take things and assume they are true, never questioning, never thinking, never critically analyzing, we are giving up our rights to do those things, essentially letting go of our basic rights as humans.
So What?At this point in the semester, I understand my responsibility to others, to my community, and the meaning of my own life as somewhat different. For others, I believe my responsibility is to question and analyze what isn’t being questioned and analyzed. If I allow the people around me to become a part of the unthinking whole of society because they don’t know how to question and analyze for myself, I have failed my responsibility to them as now, I know how to do just that. For example, when I was talking with many of my friends here at Dominican about how much we were all paying to go here, they were all shocked at how much less my tuition was compared to theirs. My friends and I all had the same GPA throughout high school, and yet I automatically got a scholarship worth half off of my tuition because of my GPA while they didn’t. I got this because I did the research and asked about it, questioned and analyzed my current tuition and looked for ways to make it smaller and was able to do that because I knew to question and analyze the world around me.
For my community and Canal Alliance the community I am working with this semester, my responsibility is to help educate them as much as I can. I understand they don’t have the same opportunities I do as a half-white/half-Filipino woman from a middle-class family, so I can take the knowledge I have about the world and help them so hopefully they can use that information for themselves. For example, one day I was watching over a group of about 7 girls and just talking to them about what Dominican was like when I asked them what they wanted to do with their lives. It made me happy to know that they all wanted to go to college and some of them even had ideas about what exactly they wanted to do and major in, but a lot of them had a really negative outlook on actually getting into college which was upsetting. I tried to share as much positive reinforcement as I could with them about being able to get into college and talked to them about opportunities like Canal Alliance and scholarships that could help them.
As far as the meaning of my own life, my responsibility is to continue using what I have learned from this class — to continue thinking, questioning, and critically analyzing the world around me and not following orders, questioning authority if need be, and not relying on default easy answers to society’s hard questions. For example, my younger sister is an extremely important person in my life, and she also happens to be at a very impressionable age of her life. I see the meaning of my life as helping her develop these same skills that I have so she can be able to do the same things I have learned to do.
Now What? A significant moment from my community experience that illustrates Butler’s thesis was when one of the girls in the room I watch over told me about a recent school experience where she got in trouble. She shared with me that she had gotten into trouble at school for drinking alcohol during school hours on school property. When I asked her why she would do that, she replied that she just simply didn’t care, and showed me some self-inflicted cuts on her arms. When I asked her how she even got the alcohol, she stated it was another girl at school who shared it with her. This experience, her showing me how vulnerable she was after knowing me for such a small amount of time showed the integral parts of Butler’s thesis. This human experience created a sad response from me, as someone diagnosed with depression, that someone so young with so much life to live would be doing things like this. Morally, I didn’t know how to respond at first, but I was able to use my own experiences to speak with her about her life. I use my experience as an opportunity to expand and connect through shared human experience.
