Alvin Tan 's Notes

[ซากคน]

I've come to realise that, the smarter or more talented you are, the more people feel the need to give you life-direction advice. Family, friends, and society love throwing prescriptions at the intellectually-blessed a la "Since you're so smart, you should be..." or "Why not use your talent to..." or "Instead of doing X with your talent, you might as well be doing Y." It is as if you automatically... owe the world something the moment you are deemed a person of calibre capable of rectifying the woes of the world for the collective betterment of mankind.

Smart people, of course, know three things: 1) they don't have the obligation to save the world, 2) they can either take society's advice and seek society's approval and validation or ignore society's advice and choose their own path (rarely both), and 3) choosing their own path is always the wiser choice. The question is not so much whether saving the world and earnestly contributing to society are worthy causes; they are. The internal tussle stems from the supposedly-agonising choice between living life for others and living life for yourself, especially when both paths are diametrically-opposed.

People should always prioritise living for themselves over living for others. That does not mean living a life that is completely selfish and hedonistic and negligent of the welfare of others. What that does mean is that you should always give more importance to yourself over others and arrive at some form of compromise that, in give-and-take parlance, takes slightly more than gives. But when given the binary choice between self and others, smart people always selfishly choose self.

Why? Because they know better that anyone who chooses the former eventually chooses both and anyone who chooses the latter eventually chooses neither.

Smart people who live for themselves first and foremost eventually gain all they want to gain: wealth, success, friends, love, and happiness, even if on a small scale. When there is nothing more to gain for themselves, they invariably channel their energy outwards to society, or, more commonly, to the people around them, like family and friends. And they probably do this for selfish reasons: they want to feel like heroes or saints to themselves. But who cares what their reason is? The most important side effect is that souls in need are helped in the process. If you cannot take care of yourself, you cannot take care of others. Similarly, the more you can take care of yourself, the more you can take care of others. Bill Gates knows this principle better than anyone else. He chose only to get involved in full-time philanthropy after building up a personal war chest worth $50 billion, though I bet he had the intention to do charity way before that.

What if you choose to live for others over self from the outset? First, I guarantee you will be miserable in the long run. Because you're not even at peace with yourself yet before you set out to aid others. Humans naturally have visions of themselves that they yearn to fulfil and that, if left unfulfilled, will eat away at the soul's happiness, crippling their ability to do anything in life, including and especially helping other people. Second, you will be terribly ineffective at your task. For instance, there is a very low limit to what an under-educated, under-exposed, under-funded housewife can do for her husband and children, no matter how big her heart is. Let's not even start talking about whether her husband and children appreciate her niceness yet; if they don't, as they more-often-than-expected don't, her entire existence would have been a pathetic joke.

Saying that smart, talented people have an obligation to contribute to society is equivalent to saying that stupid, untalented people have no obligation to contribute to society. It is somewhat like saying that a scholar is subject to a higher standard of conduct than a non-scholar (and thus a non-scholar is subject to a lower standard of conduct than a scholar?). Our dear NUS reinforced that problematic line of thought by merely revoking my scholarship for my so-called misdemeanour. What if, few months from now, a non-scholar committed the same so-called misdemeanour, and he has no scholarship to be taken away? He gets away with nothing? After all, my scholarship was taken away considering my identity as a scholar. As a student? I got nothing. The message is clear -- the less-academically-decorated have greater leeway to behave badly.

Back to the question of whether smart people should owe a larger duty to society, I believe that, if anything, your obligation to contribute to society should be directly proportional to the amount of resources you consume, not how big your brain is. Everyone should have the obligation to at least help the world break even on the resources they consume, and, if they want to let the world make a profit off of them, OR OTHERWISE, so be it. As long as they are happy, no one has a right to stop them. In other words, people should not be parasites, but that does not mean that people should be hosts to other parasites, too. Think about it.