Legibilus

  “You can’t partly agree with me and you can’t partly be lesbian.” is a quote from the Netflix series Grey’s Anatomy. Here, Dr. Hahn, a world class heart surgeon, accuses Dr. Torres, a orthopedics resident in the same hospital, of partly agreeing with her to report their hospital on a misbehavior and only partly being committed to a relationship with her. As I was watching the show, this quote led me to think that the refusal to accept any partial status is not just in decision making or relationships. We like viewing the world as an entire dichotomy; we want to know if it is a yes or a no, if it is right or wrong, if it is a success or a failure.  Here are some examples of the most prevalent dichotomy in our society. With the Olympic games happening at the moment, popular and catchy news headlines start with A won/lost to B, the reason and the score coming second in importance, because we define each team as a winner or a loser and nothing in between. In an exam, we want to...

One of the biggest changes happened to me after spending two years in university is that I began to redefine things in my own ways rather than passively perceiving them. Let’s take ‘democracy’ as an example. Before experiencing the entirely new type of enlightenment in college, I associated democracy with phrases like ‘one person one vote’, ‘will of majority’, and ‘every man is born free and equal’. But thanks to all those courses, professors, and colleagues I met in the previous years, I now know that none of them truly depicts what democracy is; in fact, it is very difficult to define democracy in a concise manner. Under the same context, a TED lecture delivered by Sir Ken Robinson inspired me profoundly. After watching the video, I could establish my own definition of ‘diplomacy’: diplomacy, according to Jin, refers to any act of interpersonal, intercultural, or intergovernmental communication done by anyone. The speech was fascinating as he pointed out two things that I saw but...

          Derived from two Greek words—dēmos, meaning ‘people’, and kratos, meaning ‘rule’— democracy probably is one of the most used words in the modern human history. It is not just politicians who mention it; when children are given opportunity to choose the date of an upcoming exam, they demand a democratic election; when people have to decide what to eat for dinner, they call for a fair vote instead of fighting against each other; even North Korea formally names itself as Democratic People's Republic of Korea while everyone knows that DPRK is perhaps the least democratic country on Earth. Furthermore, when talking about political systems around the world, we unconsciously regard democracy as a golden standard which represents both stability and equality while considering others—such as communism of China, theocracy of Iran, and absolute monarchy of the Kingdom of Eswatini—as outliers. In other words, democracy these days is inscribed deep in our unco...