I had planned to write this series chronologically, but I realized there’s no need to go in order. As a child, I had concerns, but those were trivial ones. So, if I start this series from childhood, I might digress most of the time.
For now, this short statement about my childhood would suffice: Though I had a set of challenges and peculiarities, I was a happy child. I remember lying in the living room, looking at the names of great people—Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and King Sejong, to name a few—on the book spines. I thought, I’d love to make the world a better place to live. But there was a huge barrier. The world is already perfect, and everyone is happy. If only I had been born in those days! This was my worldview before I entered elementary school. Again, I was a happy child.
I learned more about the world as time went by. Yet, despite some dissatisfaction about little things, I was satisfied with the overall status quo. I loved my nation, my nation’s allies, and the values we held together. In my early teens, I wanted to attend a military academy and become a career Army officer to defend these things. But my peaceful little world shattered at thirteen, when I was in the first year of middle school (I wasn’t in the US school system then).
I’ve argued whether I’d like to share the detailed background, and I decided against it. But here are two of many factors put bluntly: 1. Despite my parents’ disagreement, I enrolled in a middle school adjacent to one of the biggest public housing projects in the city. There was no lofty inspiration behind this. I wasn’t a cool kid in elementary school, so I wanted a new start. And most importantly, I wanted an easy GPA to get into a selective high school without much effort. But the impact of this decision turned out to be far graver than I had expected. Though I already knew that some people live in poverty, attending this school created a fissure in my near-perfect world. As I liked (and still like) to ask why, I questioned why these problems exist and persist. These questions quickly snowballed and became a fundamental doubt about the nature of humans and society. For example, children from impoverished families have far fewer resources, yet we think competition is a fair tool to determine their life paths because we grew up believing so. This raises a question about how just our system is, but it raises yet another question: Do we know what we think we know? How much of that is an illusion? Can we trust our beliefs at all? With the force of gushing water, these questions burst open the little fissure in my little world.
2. Additionally, I was infuriated by the seeming inaction of the adults, especially those who have authority. Despite uncertainty about human nature, many practical problems can be diagnosed ,and actions can be taken. For instance, a schoolmate with a bad GPA came to me one day and told me I should remember her when I became successful. She continued and said, “I’ll be a failure because I’m not good at studying.” At fourteen years old, this struck me hard. An education system is malfunctioning if it makes fourteen-year-olds feel like failures because they’re bad at book learning. One can be a productive part of this society in numerous ways, so it only makes sense for the system to suggest and celebrate all these paths. I deeply got into social activism around this age and continued to do so until I was eighteen. I didn’t hurt others or do anything immoral, but I did lots of provocative and radical things during this time. Simultaneously, my dream of becoming an exemplary citizen was extinguished for these years.
The problem is that I, caught by passion, uncritically accepted ideas simply because they are radical or advanced by activists. As it will become evident in the second part of this series, this new worldview cracked in my young adulthood, and the pendulum swung to the opposite direction. This time, however, I didn’t accept a view simply because it’s antithetical to the opposing view. So, the intellectual journey in my twenties can be characterized as reconciling my views that seemingly fall to different ends of spectrum, finding coherence between them, and revising them if necessary. And currently, as I have witnessed that a coherent system can be grounded on false premise, I’m searching for these “grounds.” But the adult part of my journey will be discussed later, once I am done talking about my teenage years.
Other posts from the series Recounting My Intellectual Journey
Series Introduction
Is optimism in a hopeless situation simply BS?
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