Unfamiliar Innovations Are Sensitively Noticeable

     

          Surrounding us are the myriad of impressive scientific achievements. It's undeniable that the growth of science has given us such essential movements, especially in the health category. Genetic engineering is also one of them. Since the 1970s, there have been wonders in genetic engineering. Specifically, it has helped the agricultural industry creating pesticide-resistant crops. Although the idea seems to bring us benefits, its practice is hard. Perhaps because artificial supplies are still are still new things to our people.

          It might seem that the pesticide-resistant crops are not something ultimately strange. The genetically modifying organisms might be no more than the combination between the traditional agriculture and factors of science. However, because it is an unfamiliar innovation to us, we seem to focus on its cautions than the characteristic of it.

          Hence, it appears to be a thing that hasn't approached our daily life before; therefore, its negative sides are sensitively noticeable even if there are disastrous consequences can be myths. Take LGBT as an example. Decades ago, it officially appeared in our society as an inappropriate thing to exist. However, recently, LGBT community is widely accepted and respected. Since then, it is understandable why thoughts like "strengthening organisms artificially can affect the natural balance of ecosystems" without clear proofs are common.

          However, as people focus on the disastrous consequences and the natural balance of ecosystems, they tend to ignore the benefits the pesticide-resistant crops could bring. Some perspectives predict these crops will help us deal with global food shortages. So, is being so cautious a liability to the solutions for our world's crisis?

          In conclusion, this genetic engineering achievement, pesticide-resistant crops, have difficulties approaching society because people haven't got enough information about them. In that way, we have accidentally ignored some innovations that might work great for the common good. However, fear and hesitation are the habitats that have helped humans to survive since the stone age, so perhaps we should thank them.    

Eurus Thach

The Harmony Between Humans And Machines

          We are living in a modern world full of supplies provided by intelligent machines. Thank the advances in technology, we are able to have more qualified goods and significant science explorations. Hence, intelligent machines help human beings develop and vice versa. However, they also produce problems.

  First, let's get to the idea of how we grow into better through the development of intelligent machines. As the growth of technology, we need to reevaluate our abilities. To have innovations in technology, we need to improve our knowledge. By then, education goes more various. As more scientific achievements we have, as more knowledge for us to purchase. For example, lost of new technological majors appear such as MIS or IT. In other words, the world's knowledge has elaborated to a higher level.

  On the other hand, because intelligent machines are repetitive, high-speed and extremely precise, the low-skill jobs are slowly taken over in our community. Since then, the potentials of the decrease in the unemployment rate is an essential concern. However, I believe there are always ways to work things out. The resilient evidence is the hard time when the economic collapse takes place, we find out solutions and innovations to solve things out. After the rain of the Depressions in history, the country rose up stronger. Take this concern as a Depression, we can push our limits higher than we've ever known. One suggestion is the open schools for the unemployed. Providing them with mechanical and technological knowledge is a way to help them get a new job.

          In contrast, there are perspectives in the society that bring us a limited view of the intelligent machines. By blaming the community's dissonance on them, we tend to forget the fact the conflicts of religions and cultures have more potentials to cause a war than a machine.

          In conclusion, advances in technology have given us chances to overcome or develop the long-standing ideas of what people can be. By that way, we also help the technology grow. It has been proved to be a harmony between humans and machines by the remarkable ways that education developed and myriad scientific achievements.

Eurus Thach

When Seeking For Others’ Lack Become Such A Fascinating Hobby Of The Human Race

From early ages, we have learned that there are always consequences comes after what we do. The stories like The Three Little Pigs play an important role in the recognition of the unwanting results of misbehaving in our childhood. We don’t want to be the misbehaving characters,  we don’t want to face the punishment, so we work on our incomplete traits. We learn to have voices inside our heads what we do bad things. Our mind then connects to the scenes of consequences and quickly awakes the consciences in us. In other words, we may deduce that bad models are imperative for the development of our characteristics and morality. 

Since we start analyzing the characters in the stories we know, we start judging. Being an essential part of our thinking system, judgment allows us to look at the mistakes, analyze and rate the quality of other individuals. We acknowledge most of the murderers are cold or most of the philanthropists are angles of God. Since then, we believe good models have more the living way to learn.

As the judging sense gets stronger, there are times that we got carried away. It’s when there is no more accommodation for the schemas and perceptions in our thinking systems. In plenty of cases, we might lock our mind in the box of the archetypes we build up for others. For example, some still believe Asians are good at Mathematics and LGBT is either a kind of sickness or an error of creation. Humorously, there are some ironical cases when a person, who lacks a quality, judges a person who also lacks that quality. I’ve seen a big-headed person judges another big-headed one. One said, “you don’t know that until it happens to you”. Hence, the joy of judgment is that how much we realize we’re better than others and that we have something to be proud of ourselves. Plus, Sigmund Freud also said humiliation was a way to release our anger. Therefore, he concluded human beings as “homo homini lupus” (a man is a wolf to a man). A person judges a bad girl by comparing the nights she spends with her boyfriend with the nights she stays at the apartment with her housemates. Since then, he can see himself as a good model and a wise man. However, when he gets a girlfriend for whom he can’t stop falling, he is later sympathetic to the girl. But still, he tries to find many reasons for not blaming himself. Or another case is even worse: a guy makes fun of the victims of sexual abuse. Since when seeking for others’ lack become such a fascinating hobby of the human race? 

We can’t stop ourselves from judging, can we? However, we can choose where is the yellow line to stop and not to turn ourselves into the slaves of judging.

Eurus Thach

Fight When The Battle Is Still Dangerous

We only fight when the battle is still dangerous. We only head in the gamble which still hazards. Only the warriors who fight in the first place have the right to criticize the battle at the very last moments. Who never be a critic in others’ glorious time, when failure comes to them, shall stay ignorant. Hence, one of Victor Hugo’s greatest work - The Les Miserable has given us a valuable lesson of being a smart critic.  

I happened to know the case of B and C, which inspired me to write this post. B and C have been best friends for years. They also work at the same company. Everyone includes B believes C is a great leader. B is a homie to C and B knows C really well. However, there is no “vice versa". B keeps a secret - a big debt from gambling. When the rush of the renter come, B, who is an account, starts stealing the monthly income of the company. To the point that the company seriously lacks investment money, B is caught. It is C who found out and asks B to leave the company. C keeps things silent except with the chairman. Punishment is set, B is leaving the company in a week with a new debt. The glorious time of judgment and blaming is when there is no explanation. C got rumours behind his back. “He cheated us,” one says. “I saw him once doing some suspicious things” another adds. B is now terrified. What can a person do when he is afraid? He’ll do anything to gain back his confidence. When being asked about C, B starts criticizing C and analysing every mistake he makes. At that moment, in the employees’ thinking, C no longer deserves the support and the compliments he has received. They refuse all the good sides C got and successfully gains his confidence back. The attraction of criticism is so powerful that B gets carried away. Get moving as a reason, the day B walks out of the company, he still keeps his head up. In the end, C has to do what he has to do. He keeps staying silent and bringing the company back in line. 

The reason the employees criticized B is they were disappointed by C. In other words, C was out of their expectation. Their knowledge, at that moment, was accessed. The new data challenges one’s belief, which directly approaches their emotions. In this story, the majority chose frustration. They started to fight against the bleeding king. Hence, the end of admiration happened in a blink. On the other hand, the king, whose pride was then damaged, was not brave enough to call for help. Your achievements and the end of them always attract the curiosity of the society. 

A battle against a powerful individual is always a greater story than a battle against a losing one.

Eurus Thach 

Life Is Beautiful Though Sometimes Its Beauty Is A Little Bit Hard To Savour

Human beings have been chasing after the self-satisfaction and good feelings for thousands of decades. It is a natural instinct and it is an undeniable right in the state of nature. Because of this, it turns out difficult for us to face the consequences when things go wrong. Imagine when you got cheated. Imagine when you grow up in a home full of violence. Imagine when the ones you love the most suddenly pass away. There are some of us who are disappointed, some might be depressed, the others might think about suicide and many people might choose to do so.

When things go down to the hole, we might wonder why that the negativities, the pains, the tragedies hit us all at once. Is that our faults or it is meant to be? We are not born to expect the sorrow to come. We are not taught what to do when we’re broken. We choose joy and I strongly believe everyone deserves it.

We, humans, have a remarkable ability to build up hope. Let’s take an example when we are looking at the ones we love lying on the bed of the hospital and hear that they are untreatable, what we will do? After hours and hours drowning ourselves in tears and regret, we build up our hope. Victor Hugo once said, “hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man”. In the darkest night, we’ll hold on to anything even a spot of light. However, when the ones we love can’t make it, it’s impossible for us to accept the truth. Are we avoiding to believe what is happening around us?

Please open your hands. Please do the hand gesture like you are reaching something. We’ll see our fingers open, keep space from each other, won’t we? Our hands will be in the direction of the object, won’t they? The highest possibility here is our middle fingers will touch the object first. Well, we are all so familiar to the middle finger’ s meaning. Hence, whenever we touch or reach something, the disadvantages, the unexpected negativities are already there, in front of us. However, we choose to ignore them all.

How many people think of the possibilities of the negativities? How many people prepare for them? How many people are ready to face them?

Some people may feel pessimistic thinking about them but I’d rather say how thoughtful and brave of them to do so.

Thinking about the lost, we will appreciate the time we got with the ones we love. Thinking about the pain, we will pick up lessons.

Even life is full of obstacles, it is still full of light.

We can choose to spend our best effort to forget about something or we can choose to remember it, learn from it to turn the pain into something precious.

Hence, life is beautiful though sometimes its beauty is a little bit hard to savour.

Eurus Thach.

When You Knock Your Ex-crush' s Door Twice

(A picture of Brennan Ehrhardt
https://unsplash.com/search/photos/red-door?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

I have knocked my ex-crush’ s door twice. Hence, twice, but not in a then-run-away way. I and my ex-crush had known each other before. We had chatted for a week before he told me that he missed me and started sending me heart emojis. Then things suddenly became silent that I was so shocked and I questioned myself where I had done wrong. It was in the winter that the first time occurred, the snow was falling when my sister was driving me to the destination. “I need to go”, I told her so. I was more than excited and a bit thrilled. I had seen him at school in an extremely stressful mood and I told myself “you must do something, he is not ok at all”. I had tried to reach him several times before all the effort went down to the hole. “I can try saying some positive things or at least I can tell him that I like him”. Sitting on the car, the strong feelings about him kept making my heart heavier. It’s the longest 10-minute distance I had ever known. I knocked, the door opened. Tiny snowflakes were dancing around me when the one appeared at the door froze me a bit. It was his mom. “Life is not as beautiful as a fairy tale”, I assumed, “well, it can’t end this way”. With a huge surprising expression that still remained on her face after our greeting, I softly asked if she could tell him that I came. I went back to the car with a huge happy-ending hope. However, there was nothing in response. “What a poor guy”, then I comforted myself, “his phone must be stolen”.

If there is a “first time”, the “second time” will always go after. In another snowing day, after I helped my brother with his heavy delivery job, I went exhausted. I then still decide to challenge my fate again. Again, I met his mother and the response never came.

My sister told me that I lost the self-respect of a girl and that she never wanted to be like me.

Awww, how can I say? Her bowling ball had perfectly stricken all the pin laying in my heart.

People who knew my story told me that I was so out of my mind and that girls never did do such things. I had being drown in their words for weeks until I realized something. Hence, “no one does such things. Especially a girl”. However, I did, which meant that bravery was greater than others. Imagine if I was in an interview in which the interviewer gently asked me “how risky can you be?”, I would confidently tell them “I’m willing to take the consequence or at least I can have a positive look at everything I do”. 

I then met a guy whom I am dating now. It’s more than a blessing to me that we can be together. “There will always be a better one”, he told me, “even when you suppose that the previous person is the best”. Hence, I so appreciate that he is mine and vice versa.

I met my ex-crush again on a day that Sakura was celebrating the air of the spring and asked him how he was doing.

Perhaps there are always people in our lives who are meant to be the passengers.

Eurus Thach.
     

The Pursuit of Happiness

The Pursuit of Happiness

Where does the satisfaction of a sociopath come from? Sociopaths, whose conscience deeply falls asleep, have enjoyment in winning. It might be seen as a competitive character. To all of us,  “the opinions of other people keep us all in line, arguably better than anything else” (Stout 23). To sociopaths, happiness is the core of life.

Paul Bloom had made an interesting point in his book, “pleasure is deep. What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is” (xii). In other words, when an individual has a hypothesis about the world that later he receives a confirmation that it is right, he gets pleasure. This can be seen in the character of Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door, Supper Skip. He appeared to be an extraordinary child with a brilliant mind. Since he was aware of his gift, he has become remarkably arrogant. When he was in school, making teachers feel foolish was one of his favorites. Regarding Bloom’s statement of pleasure, we know Skip is finding pleasure in confirming that he is smarter than everyone else. Generally, any person with the same level of Skip’s intelligence would have the same tendency to act like him. However, Skip is not just any person, he has taken it to the next level. His need for pleasure is never fulfilled. It keeps building up to the point that it only makes sense to him. For example, Skip hates frogs, and to him, they are ugly creatures. At first, he cut them up with scissors. Getting tired of cutting, he stole his parents’ cash to buy a pack of fireworks in order to blow them up. In his view, the suffering on their faces was exactly what he had assumed as “fuck-face”. Due to his high intelligent, “the plan worked like a charm” (Stout 38). It is said that “when sociopathy and bloodlust come together in the same person, the result is a dramatic-even a cinematic-nightmare, a horror figure who seem larger than life” (Stout 48). Hence, since early ages, Skip has been sociopathic who doesn’t even try to fight against his bloodlust.

(https://es.vexels.com/png-svg/vista-previa/139937/los-nios-que-juegan-con-el-juguete)

Did Skip know that his endeavor was morally wrong? According to Martha Stout, sociopaths are lack of conscience and remorse. So the replaced question needs answering would be whether the sociopaths know that they are lack of conscience. Case one, they don’t. In their thinking, this world is dull, what they do is simply to make it more colorful. What can be more pleasurable than satisfying both of your belief and curiosity at the same time? Especially, exploiting frogs in Skip’s world could be logically seen as an innocent joy because of the failure of understanding kindness rather than an immoral thinking.

Vice versa, case two, they do. Martha Stout defined “bad behavior is the result of faulty thinking, rather than a lack of synderesis, or conscience” (29). In order to exemplify bad behavior, Stout had created Dr. Doreen Littlefield. She is a typical competitive sort of person. Everything she does is just to make she appear to be better than others. She likes to park next to an old car so that her car would be more noticeable. She likes to walk her froufrou dog in order to have her appearance became more elegant. It’s quite ordinary until we find out that her dog is just simply kept as an accessory. In other words, her “stupid” dog’s life does not matter to her at all. Another story, when Doreen realized her co-worker, Dr. Jackie Rubenstein, was about to get the award of the best “mentor”,  her jealousy got worse. The competitive Doreen convinced Jackie’s patient, who was ready to get hospital release, that his mental illness was getting more serious. As a doctor, she was completely aware of what she was doing was morally wrong. Therefore, her action reached all of the conditions to be considered, according to Stout’s statement, as “the result of faulty thinking”. So why did Doreen still decide to do so even though she knew it was not right and strongly against the Hippocratic Oath? It could be because of the jealousy. As Stout wrote in her book, Doreen felt that life “has not given her nearly the same bounty as other people, and so she must even the existential score by robbing people, by secretly causing destruction in others lives” (76). Doreen believes that it is meant to be her destiny, and “diminishing other people is her only means of being powerful” (76).   

(https://orig00.deviantart.net/4956/f/2015/145/d/7/mask_of_sanity_by_mew_painappuru-d38xi1c.jpg)

From this angle, Doreen could be seen as a Lucifer. Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Science of Evil, explained: “people can be cruel to each other not out of evil but because of empathy erosion” (8). With the lack of empathy and the depth of self-satisfaction which is hard to resist, sociopaths have more possibilities to become demons. Simon Baron-Cohen also pointed out “ when people are solely focused on the pursuit of their own interests, they have all the potential to be empathic. At best in this state, they are in a world of their own and their behavior will have a little negative impact on others” (8). When negativities come to life, in order to release anger and frustration, people borrow random models to humiliate them, laugh at them just to feel better, which is familiar to the need of self-satisfaction. “Homo Homini Lupus” (a man is a wolf to a man). Since we have negative judgments about others like the sociopaths always do, why there is such a big distance between us and the sociopaths? The remarkable theory of Freud about Superego might be a great answer. The Superego, according to Freud, is the rules of decision, which is ordinarily seen as morality. Normally, we can’t stop our bad feelings about others but we rarely use them or try our best to rob them. We are scared, in my theory, that our bad behaviors can destroy the people who we think we are. In other words, the ordinary build-up moral archetypes not only for the public display but also for themselves. Our good behaviors and traits make us proud. Vice versa, sociopaths’ good behaviors, and traits give them vanity. Generally, they only have good feelings when they receive praises. With a strong passion for being praised and poorly developed Superego, they are willing to act regardless of the moral standards.

Since “civilization requires such sacrifices, not only of sexuality but also of the aggressive tendencies in mankind”, which is claimed in Civilization and Its Discontents, “prospects of enjoying happiness for any length of time were very slight” (Freud). Theoretically, what sociopaths do is just to last their enjoyments longer, which I would love to call "Living Selfishly".

In conclusion, sociopaths are just rule-breakers whose happiness is a threat to others. Because of their boredom and lack of sympathy for others’ feelings, sociopaths can do anything that makes their world more interesting. It is their needs. They have the high satisfaction of what they do without feeling any remorse afterward. This reveals their primitive pursuit of happiness which has a strong connection with selfishness and unevolved civilization. If happiness is an innocent need, then how can you persuade a serial killer, who is usually sociopathic, that killing is wrong?  

Eurus Thach
With the precious support of Louise Nguyen

( I’m in the middle of my research The Box Theory which consists of four main types of living: The Religious, The Non-Religious, The Self-Religious and The Socially Religious.

This is a part of my research, which is consisted of Chapter 3: The Self-Religious.

The Self-Religious circles the individuals who lead their lives by their rules without the consideration of social standards about morality, common good or civilization.) 

REFERENCES

Baron-Cohen, Simon. Science of evil: on empathy and the origins of cruelty. Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2012.

Bloom, Paul. How Pleasure Works: the New Science of Why We like What We Like. W.W. Norton, 2011.

Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Editor's Introduction. (1961).”PsycEXTRA Dataset, doi:10.1037/e417472005-547.

Stout, Martha. The Sociopath next Door: the Ruthless versus the Rest of Us. Broadway Books, 2006.