Withstanding Conflict

            Growing up, I have been someone who avoids conflict at all costs. I don’t mean the little squabbles between siblings, because that would make the previous sentence a lie. Instead I avoid disagreeing with people in significant issues both inside and outside my parents’ house. This clearly isn’t a beneficial trait to have all the time. While I don’t get myself in needless heated arguments, my aversion to conflict can lead me to stay silent in class discussions where I am afraid my opinion will be fought against rather strongly.

            For example, this past spring I took a class on dystopian fiction and we read and then went to discuss “Pop Squad” by Paolo Bacigalupi. In this short story, despite global warming devastating the planet a relative utopia has been created since scientists discovered a serum that gives eternal life and mass-produced it in a vaccination. However, people became worried about over-populating the planet and so banned people from having children. Children found are shot and the mothers carted off to a single sex internment camp and forcibly sterilized. Since the fathers are often anonymous illegal sperm donors, they aren’t caught as often, but their fate would be the same if caught. Our discussion followed many threads, but one asked how this brutality was tolerated and how society evolved to demonize children.

            One thought that came to my mind is that our society can in many ways already be seen as already heading down that path. From 3 weeks on a fetus has a heartbeat. An abortion therefore ends that heartbeat and life. However, many claim that a fetus isn’t human until different points in a pregnancy or their life since it relies on the mother isn’t a life at all. I wanted to comment that the children in “Pop Squad” could have been dehumanized in the same way fetuses, or unborn children, have been dehumanized. However, I understood that this was a very controversial and inflammatory statement that would most likely, especially in a mainstream college, not be received well, and could easily make people dehumanize and/or demonize me for holding such a belief. So I stayed silent.

            Recently, I have been listening to Jordan B. Peterson* a Canadian professor, who came under fire for disagreeing with the idea that gender-neutral pronouns should be mandatory under Bill C-16. He talks a lot about a book called the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who if understand Peterson correctly ended up in Gulag during the Soviet Union. Instead of becoming understandably bitter, Solzhenitsyn asked himself how he was in part responsible for ending up there and so he sat and thought about every time he stayed silent when he knew personally he should have spoken out. Peterson has been obsessed for how people could become Auschwitz guards, because terrifyingly they were normal people. He has come to the conclusion that it is through staying silent when you know you should speak up, by allowing yourself to be censored. In the dystopian fiction class, my life wasn’t even in danger and I stayed silent. Worse, universities are supposed to be a place for discussion and sharing ideas. So in a relatively very safe environment I said nothing.  I could be an Auschwitz guard. 

            Since I realized this, I have been trying to speak my mind when I know I should speak my mind. However, it is easy for me to say I try to do that, when there haven’t been many instances, since I came to this realization, where I could prove my resolve to myself. That is until today. On the Jordan Peterson subreddit, where people can discuss his ideas on this social media platform called Reddit, there was a post about fundamental Christianity. A commenter there essentially said that fundamental Christians vote out of fear of God torturing them. Terrified though I was of conflict, I felt like I had to speak out and responded that as a more fundamentalist Christian I don’t believe in or follow a God who tortures people.** What followed was a respectful conversation between the two of us. We ended with the redditor saying they don’t think I should hold my beliefs at all because there is no reasonable reason to in their opinion and that more moderate beliefs allow extremist beliefs to exist. Obviously I disagree with that, but I have exams to study for. So I just responded that my arguments were going to go to the no reasonable reason comment and would have largely derived from 3 books Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door by Bob Hostetler, and It Couldn’t Just Happen by Lawrence O. Richards.*** I started the conversation barely being able to type because my hands were shaking so much and ended it with a “Have a good day!” and feeling like I had done something enjoyable and worthwhile.

     My braveness for today ends with posting this on my blog, that is just starting out knowing that if it would suddenly be discovered by millions, I would likely come under fire. However, the advice I found for those, trying to become authors, was to start a blog and just say what is going on in your life. I would be lying if I said this conversation wasn’t what was most pressing on my mind beside those exams.

       Oh! Before I forget the HIIT writing worked well I ended up getting around 3-4 hours of writing done and not feeling ridiculously drained and exhausted afterwards, because of the breaks in between. So I would highly recommend that strategy if you want to get a lot of intense writing done in a short amount of time.

*For those interested he has a youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos and a website https://jordanbpeterson.com. I’m not getting paid by him. I just find him interesting.

** For those who want proof, it’s not coming, because I don’t want to quote the redditor without their permission and don’t feel like asking because that would possibly link my reddit to this blog and I would just like to avoid that for now. For those r/thathappened comments thinking the story is fake, it isn’t, but feel free to think of this like a thought experiment then.

***Again not paid, but they’re good reads, in my opinion.