Theodore Fan, Period 7, 11/29/22, Modern Mythology 2023

 My thoughts and feelings about issues of oppression: 

I think there’s a fine line between what people call oppression and coercion. Then again, coercion isn’t such a nice word either. (coercion and oppression are synonyms anyway). “The practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats” - coercion vs “the state of being subject to unjust treatment or control” - oppression. So then are both bad? Not necessarily. In AP government, we learned that for any stable kind of government to exist there has to be some form of coercion. For example, the Articles of Confederation. Big disaster. The federal government might as well not have existed. There were no “United” states of America but just states of America. Might as well just call them separate nations. What’s ironic about it is in fearing a strong central monarchy like what Britain had, it led to America having basically no central government at all. It had no way to collect taxes from the states (except through donations), it had no required military, the list could go on but basically; it was such a bad system that instead of revising it, they completely got rid of it altogether. But is forcibly collecting people's taxes oppression or just necessary coercion? Logically it sounds necessary but I don’t know a single person on earth who says they love getting taxed. I guess you can say the difference between the two words is: is it unjust? Of course the world isn’t so simple but we’ll look at an example of an issue of oppression to try and see my take on it. (for after you read the example below): I think a common issue with a lot of issues of oppression is that one group is being unjustly treated (well duh, but hear me out). But another huge issue is what I personally like to call the moderate paradox. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about the white moderate and the basic idea of a moderate is a person who doesn’t really care about an issue. He deems them as more detrimental to a cause than a person against their cause. Using my Hijab example, while there are plenty of examples of people protesting on the streets, the truth is the majority of people aren’t protesting or fighting for change. Now this is the paradox part. For society to be stable, there needs to be a certain degree of moderates. If everyone was radical, the world would be chaos. So, we need moderates to keep society stable but they are also what hold society back from change whether it be good or bad. If there is a solution to this paradox, I’d love to hear it. 

Hijab protests in Iran:

Now I think it’s been made quite obvious through the media (or at least the media I consume) that you should wear whatever the heck you want to wear. The issue I see with this conflict is that it’s a bunch of men (or well, majority male) telling a bunch of women that they have to wear something. BUT it’s not like you don’t see men wearing turbans and the like right? Well it’s also apparent that women, on average, have significantly longer hair than men. But everyone just wants to make sure that the followers of the religion are faithful. That in itself is a whole issue with who is Muhammad’s successor and how it split the religion into Sunni and Shi’a. I’m not very familiar with the religion but I believe it basically goes: anyone you could theoretically marry you must hide your hair. In the Quran it states they must hide their “charms.” While the Quran part clearly has some issues of its own (how we talked about in class with women being innately evil/dark and stuff) it’s your choice to follow the religion. If it’s in the holy text it must be followed right? I personally don’t think so. I talked about this in my views of death (the Egyptian book of the dead assignment we all had to do) but there was a whole “The Great Awakening” religious revival that happened because religion was kinda dying off in the colonies. They basically made religion a lot more approachable and nice. The old view being you were destined from birth to either go to hell or heaven towards the more merit based system we have today. Now is that very religiously accurate? Was it right to do this? Was it right for King Henry to create his own version of the religion just to satisfy his “needs?” Sorry for the tangent but the point I’m trying to make here is that all of these situations listed are critical moments where the religions basically split from their original path in some way or another and the practitioners of those religions (basically common folk like you and me) choose whatever they believed was right. WHATEVER MADE THEM HAPPY! Even if you do see a woman revealing her hair in public, what has that gotta do with you? Is it your right, your duty, to make everyone follow your beliefs? Then you failed because there’s a large chunk of this world that’s atheist. There’s another chunk of the world that doesn’t even believe in the same god or gods or goddesses as you do. Do what you can? (from Pew Research Center): The Quran states that God will judge each individual by his or her deeds and that heaven awaits those who have lived righteously and hell those who have not. But then what is considered righteous? “Acting in accord with divine or moral law.” - Merriam Webster. My point is the “OR.” Is it very moral to force people to wear something even when they don’t want to? I don’t think it is. (at least, this is my take on things based on the research I’ve done). (IT COULD CHANGE). 

How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

My response:

I’m not the type of person to just start reflecting on actions I’ve done in the past or things I’ve said. Something needs to prompt me to start thinking about it. Whether it be a youtube video or something a friend said. That’s where I start thinking about it and mainly the issue of: do I agree or disagree with that person? I tend to trail off and ramble a lot when thinking as I’m a huge fan of using examples and analogies. This can make me lose my train of thought a lot and make me lose focus on what event prompted the thinking in the first place. When it comes to my beliefs, I like to be aware of pre-placed biases in my head and try to reflect on things unbiasedly. Things like the backfire effect and hindsight bias really irk me though as I hate being proven wrong (not that I hate being proven wrong but more so how I was dumb enough to be wrong in the first place). My beliefs tie in a lot with my assumptions as whenever I’m given something new, I like to analyze it and form assumptions about it which leads to the formation of my beliefs. If my assumptions of things are wrong, then my beliefs will be wrong and I feel stupid. I hate feeling stupid. (who doesn’t though?). When I try to assume things in my thought train but I can’t find an answer, I desperately look for others opinions on those things or if there’s something that I’ve believed in but there’s an authorial position saying I’m wrong, I desperately want to know why and ask about it. My values come heavily from my parents/how I was raised and I think it irks anyone when someone does something that your values would consider wrong. HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY DO THAT?! While I would love to say I’m omnipotent and say everyone has their own values, mind your business or give your opinion and move on, I like to debate with the other person about these kinds of issues. And majority of the time, these debates go nowhere. I don’t like this side of me but I desperately want to understand both points of view in an argument. I tend not to factor experiences in when reflecting on stuff. The main reasons for this is that experiences are super specific to you and not generalized for everyone and if you base things on experience, you often base it on the most recent experience and it can warp your opinion extremely hard. A bad example but: if I get one shot by a character in a video game, I’d say that character would be extremely strong off the memory of the moment alone. But if I go to a statistics website for that game, there could be entirely different numbers and results that show it’s actually not as strong as I thought. 

These aspects that pop up in reflection influence my perception of myself and others basically in that I believe that people are always changing. Striving to grow. It’s crucial to me that I look at something as unbiasedly as I possibly can and try and see where the other person is coming from. I prefer listening to other people rather than me talking to others and I don’t like to leave arguments unfinished. I don’t get passionate about a lot of things because either I’m not invested enough or don’t think I know enough to talk about it but the things I am passionate about, I have very strong beliefs in and would fiercely debate with others. Like that 16 personalities test we took as a class a while back, I’d like to believe we’re all mediators, striving to be the best version of ourselves as possible.