Published 0:06 Monday, June 8th, 2009 by yeer 1,005 views
ISSUE 136
136. "The absence of choice is a circumstance that is very, very rare."
Imagine the following scene: you are perspiring profusely after a game of baseball and pick up a bottle of iced cola as usually facing various kinds of food and beverage. You make a choice; you probably chose the juiciest apple when there are only several sacks of nuts and a couple of apples, though what you actually desire is cola. You make a choice, too. The former could be called an active choice, which means you can choose freely what you want, and the latter refers to a passive one, which you have to make, similar to a forced work.
In the real world, most choices are passive ones while active choices are rare. It is well know that peasant workers, migratory laborers from countryside during slack seasons engaging in simple physical work with low payment, constitute a large portion of China’s work force. Among them, you can easily find some young people who should be at school as their peers. After graduating from high school and even primary school, some youngsters have to choose one between continuing their study in college and going to find a job to afford the tuition fee for their brothers or /and sisters due to the low income of their family. Unfortunately, most of them choose the latter one driven by their responsibility as the elder. While in relatively rich families in cities, many children are asked to learn to play piano and dance or something else which, their parents insisted stubbornly and expect confidently, will make them better than others and finally become the elite of society. In this case, children tend to choose the subject that they do not hate most.
There exists even worse situation: only nuts are in front of you and no apples at all. You certainly chose to continue thirst. Do not think this is merely an extreme assumption. Just think about refugees in Africa. They have no chance to make a choice between two pieces of evening dresses as nearly attracting as each other to attend a party, which may be annoying you; they can not choose whether to enter university or to find a decent job; they have no chance to choose between watching a Hollywood blockbuster in a modern cinema and enjoying a splendid game of super bowl in a magnificent stadium in Saturday night since all of such facilities have been ruined by lasting war. The only choice for them is to wait for limited relief; to wish the civil war come to end forever as soon as possible; to expect plague which took their families and friends away to be constrained earlier.
As a matter of fact, the active choice is rare in modern society. Most of better choices have been taken up by winners of ubiquitous competitions and people who came earlier and thus few cola and apples are left to you. Before two kinds of choices are differentiated clearly, to assert that the absence of choice is a circumstance that is very, very rare is arbitrary and superficial.
Tags:AW GRE ISSUE
Loading ...