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The Right.

3 min readAug 31, 2015

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Paradoxically, there is no perfect definition of the term ‘right’. It is commonly associated with the opposition of the ‘left’ or the ‘wrong’.

Rightfully, the notion of ‘right’ becomes problematic in the industrial capitalist world we live in.

We ought to make the rational and logical decisions within the plethora of choices available to us. Rationality has seeped so deep that it dug a hole for emotions for future burial process. Whoever brought up the logic that everything we do in life has an opportunity costs. For instance, I could be sleeping early and allowing my body to reset its pace for a gruelling day in school tomorrow, yet here I am typing this post. I foresaw the trade-off between two choices and decided to give the middle finger to whatever the next day brings. But some people, such as my beloved parents, argue that the choice is rather irrational and ‘wrong’ because university studies are undoubtedly the top priority. To say that I am fully responsible for my current and future state of self is adult. So if hypothetically I collapse on the way to school due to the lack of rest, is entirely my fault of picking the wrong choice.

Then the question is what if I had continually adopted the safer option by choosing the rational choice not just this time, but all my life?

On second guess, I believe I would make the perfect fit for the capitalist system- someone who would make no mistake in eliciting rational choices by endless costs and benefits analysis. My tongue would be inherently politically correct with hidden agendas. Despite expressing myself, I am not actually expressing my truth self. On the inside, the innate humanistic drives are constantly repressed like a raging animal caged within the rationality walls for ‘good’ measures. On the outside, we are mere shadows of ourselves. To put it simply, we are fake; we have become walking rational creatures with no character and emotions.

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I am not positing that we all should be irrational creatures with emotions as our mental compass, but we should seek to establish the balance between rationality and emotions. That would definitely help us to make decisions in life.

With that said, I would like to acknowledge that there can be no right or wrong decision within any peruse of morality.

Also I am not saying that any actions we engage is bounded by a cause and effect logic. For instance, sometimes we just do random stuff without any logical explanation; however this would lead to the dichotomy between rationality and biological urges in determining our actions. The former is explicit in the sense that almost any rational head would understand the actions within particular context. The latter is rather unpredictable yet we continually try to comprehend our biologically drives especially with the psychological studies. This scientific mode of studying the humans is scary…. I could go on and bring up Foucault’s work, but I will stop here.

Back to making the right choice, it seems to me that we are conditioned into this mode of thinking unconsciously within the four walls of the social structure.

Funny how something ontological is able to morph us into sad robots…

But even robots need blankets to keep warm…

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Ziggie
Ziggie

Written by Ziggie

Ramblings from a sociology graduate.