"Know thyself” and “know nothing.”

[thelastword83]

Nocturnal schedule's a biotch. Left all alone, just me with my nicotine and caffinee hyperstimulated mind, I've decided I'd bless everyone with another essay you won't read. Come on! Stop pretending to be cool, let loose the secret nerd inside

Comments

[_queenofhearts_]

In my Language & Culture in the Middle East class, we were discussing the poetry of this Bedouin tribe in Egypt, and the point came up that in this tribe, there is absolutely no sense of needing to be oneself. There is no sense that under all of us there is a, as you say, "natural identity just aching to emerge". My professor pointed out that this is largely a Western, if not strictly American, idea. Why, then, do Americans feel this so strongly when the idea has not even occured to people in other cultures? It's just kind of interesting how something that really does permeate every aspect of our society has never even surfaced elsewhere.

[thelastword83]

Good question! I don't know if you read the part about justice and punishment, but other cultures view punishment very differently from us. Confucians, for example, view punishment the way I view punishment, as corrective or educational. Punishments need not "fit the crime;" they need to fit the criminal, to best reform him. Others viewed punishments as control methods, explaining why many Asian nations still assign extremely brutal and cruel penalties to minor crimes. If they were interested in restoring balance, clearly they wouldn't chop off people's hands for stealing. Instead, they're interested in terrifying people into good conduct