Collective Reality!

I woke up in the middle of the night, remembering a book I read many years ago. As usual, I don’t remember the title or the author, but I remember the content. It was about someone who fought back against the dictator of their country and then won. While in power, he realized he was doing the same things he had despised before.

I know people blame the system for things they hesitate to intervene in because they are afraid of losing their status quo or simply don’t care enough. In a psychological study, they found that when students of religious studies were in a hurry, they didn’t help people who needed their help along the way. I have witnessed these things firsthand and secondhand more than once before.

I still remember a quote that said, “Who said life is fair?” Life is not as simple as the things written in books. There are so many things intertwined. Sometimes, people cannot see their own biases and cruelty because everyone around them is doing the same thing.

How Black people were treated in U.S. history shocked me for a long time when I first started to discover it. I had heard about it before but only truly understood it when I was studying in Atlanta and visited The King Center, which holds the memories of Martin Luther King, Jr. I went there more than once, staring at the same pictures, understanding things I had never understood before.

When I had the chance to visit Washington, D.C., I spent more than half of my day in the Holocaust Memorial Museum, trying to understand why people do such things. Later, I discovered the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment and was shocked to realize that many ordinary people can do the same thing. I started to think differently after that. I see things that others may not notice.

These are the things that came to my mind in the middle of the night.

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