‘AND’ not ‘OR’
Posted on October 24, 2021I’ve gone through a world of change over the past couple of months, literally. Here I am in New York, a little over 7500 miles from what I used to call home. The farthest I’ve ever been from home, the longest, alone.
In this new world, this new phase of my life, I find myself in the middle of conversations seemingly alien to the ones I’m used to. These conversations, a part of the mundanity of this world, are far detached from the ones back home, disparate in their nature. Every conversation, every interaction somehow ends up on the political incorrectness of society, there’s always the ever present character of capitalism or patriarchy, racism or sexism, and I struggle to find my place within it. Now to be clear, this isn’t news to me, nor am I foreign to issues at hand, yet I find myself having little to say in these matters, if at all. There are so many things I would not have considered back home, so many things I have nothing to say about simply because they came much later into my life. This then becomes a matter of observing that as a society we’ve been conditioned to think that we need to have an opinion about everything, all the time, that if our opinion isn’t bigger, better [1] and more elaborate than that of others, then we’re considered inferior to them.
So, as usual, I resorted to google. I typed in “What is it like to not have an opinion?”. An array of articles later I felt relieved to find that I wasn’t alone in this ordeal, it seemed that this was an issue that was common enough to warrant a significant array of results. Alas, it did not last long, eventually a few suggested articles pointed to a factor that sent me spiraling again.
Well, that’s awful. I am not ‘apathetic’ by any means.
Now of course even back home racism, sexism, classism, etc. are a big discourse. However they have always been more private by nature, concepts I rarely discussed outside of my friends or family, my ‘safe’ space. They were not warmly welcomed by society, always wrapped in the form of stories and morals that always seemed to create a distance between them and reality. It was always meant to be something known on a subliminal level, understood but not stated. Something so deeply embedded in the thought process that people learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive [2] as being the comfortable norm. Now the abject change in the political environment makes me uncomfortable. I feel trapped between these worlds -so completely different from each other- that tend to see things in duality, here I stand within the unaddressed, grey area. I do not think that I have an opinion yet, at least not one developed enough to voice, lest the world judge a statement made without proper comprehension. Instead I suppose I’ll focus on understanding them first, before I am compelled to choose the ‘right’ side. I want to fathom the opportunities and obstacles of both, or rather, all sides. We live in an era where silence on any issue usually equates to complicity,[3] that not having an opinion voiced signals ignorance or even apathy. The lack of information does not make me apathetic, nor does it make me freely ignorant.
We live in such a complex network of thoughts, opinions, beliefs and cultures that it is nearly impossible to draw a line between what is good or bad, godly or evil, happy or sad, trash or treasure. It is often the case that the truth is often the opinion that is largely accepted by the majority, the universal truth. If being entitled to an opinion means having them be viewed and treated as serious candidates for the truth,[4] then it is quite clearly a false dogma. Positive and negative aspects are simple constructs of the mind, the truths of one person may not be the same as those of another, in the end it all depends on context. One person’s martyr is another’s terrorist, a life taken in self-defense and a life taken for self-propagation is often a tale for the winner to tell and the situation to justify. In no way does this mean that taking a life is a morally justifiable act, yet the context of that act makes it more or less palatable for society.
The opinions of people are always a result of their growth, environment and situation. It is formed and influenced by the interactions with their families, cultures, political environments, etc.
Aspects that are subject to change, to evolve. There should be enough room to facilitate that change, there should be encouragement for that change and by association, acceptance of the changing opinions of people. People should not be judged for changing their opinions. Opinions will almost always change, in some way or the other. Maybe you started believing one thing and moved onto another with time, with interactions, with a new environment, just like mine. These thoughts, opinions, they’re constantly changing, evolving, transforming and that is perfectly okay! Why should opinions have to dictate a permanent side? Why does it have to be a ‘this OR that’? Why can it not meander within ‘this AND that’?
Yet these dialogues have power to them, a significance and just because to some it feels unlikely to make a quantifiable difference is no reason to believe that it is not of worth. I do not advocate speaking for or against something, instead simply speaking of it in the first place.
For all of my life I have been part of and grown in a system that followed a modus operandi of necessity, the fact that what was necessitated was not the questioning of such concepts meant that I chose to keep them close to myself. So now I continue to stay with my questions, to stay with the trouble.[5] Sure there are many ‘isms’ and ‘ists’ for me to get to yet. It will take some time to understand them, accept the things that are happening and eventually move ahead with them. In the fullness of time, I hope I will weave a fabric of my own understanding around these aspects of life. Till then, I suppose there’s merit to seeing the forest for the trees. Doing so will not halt progress or make us apathetic- rather make us thoughtful, even give us the space to examine our role in society and where we are today. It’s okay to conserve energy, it’s okay to not fight every battle [6], to pursue a deeper reflection and to finally pick the battles of our own choosing, after all, there are plenty of them laid in front of us.
– cs
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Sources:
[1] Brine, A. (2020, May 19). The Stigma of NOT Having an Opinion. Www.linkedin.com.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stigma-having-opinion-aly-brine/
[2] Boehnert, J., & Onafuwa, D. (2016). Design as Symbolic Violence: Reproducing the “isms” + A Framework for Allies.
https://www.decolonisingdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Boehnert_Onafuwa_Design-as-Symbolic-Violence.pdf
[3] Desai, R. (2020, December 6). It’s Okay: Not To Have An Opinion About Everything. The Swaddle. https://theswaddle.com/its-okay-not-to-have-an-opinion-about-everything
[4] Rathi, A. (2016, December 4). A philosophy professor explains why you’re not entitled to your opinion. Quartz.
https://qz.com/852709/a-philosophy-professor-explains-why-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion/
[5] Haraway, D. J. (2016, September 19). Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
[6] Ellis, P. (2019, April 11). How Not Having an Opinion Has Improved My Quality of Life. Repeller. https://repeller.com/art-of-not-having-opinions/