27 May 2004: The Hard Stuff

The finals for both my classes were on Tuesday. Algebra in the morning. There were forty students on the first day of class; only a dozen of us made it all the way to the final. Not because the class was particularly harsh, nor because of any fault of the teacher (who was great), but because most of the students had long since been turned into mental cripples by the American elementary and secondary education systems, the mass media, and modern parenting styles. Of the dozen of us who made it to the final, more than half had either not been born in the U.S., or had been raised by immigrant parents. The rest (including myself) were all people who would stand out as obvious oddballs in a random sampling of modern Americans, and who probably hadn't fit in very well in their pre-college school days.

I was the last one finished with the exam - when I handed in my paper, it was just me and the instructor in the room, and the class had technically been over for three or four minutes. Gave me the opportunity to thank the instructor, and to mention to him that this had been my first math class since Fifth Grade.

Based on what I know of everyone's previous test grades and class participation, I think I finished last more because I'm slow and meticulous than because I was struggling more than the others. It was a challenging test, though. I don't have a very clear idea of how well I did - anywhere from an A to the upper ranges of a C. If it's the latter I'll end up with a B in the class; otherwise, it will be an A, since I did well on all the previous tests.

In the afternoon, I took my Psychology final. A few days previously, Dragon Lady had officially declared me a Psychology Geek, because I'd told her that the Psychology final was "the fun thing I get to do to unwind after the Algebra final." Which it was. This time, I was the first one finished, and I finished so early that everyone in the class gave me funny looks as I walked out. But hey, there are reasons it's my major.

Right now I'm having a bleary day of caffeine withdrawl, having addicted myself to caffeine over the course of the past couple of months in order to get enough Algebra study time in while keeping up with the rest of my life. I kick substance addictions with unusual ease; I'll be fine tomorrow. Besides, I was just doing green tea (and those amazing caffeinated mint/chocolate Clif Bars, which are made with green tea extract). No coffee - I'd never go on The Hard Stuff.

Memory: Philadelphia... the Degenerate Days... Cabertoss is studying for his finals. Five in the morning, a bunch of us are hanging out in the living room when Cabertoss comes downstairs for some coffee. He's carrying a fist-sized cube of aluminum foil. He sits down with us and unwraps the foil, revealing a small brick of a Mysterious White Substance. Producing one of the many knives he carries (all of which he keeps honed to razor sharpness), he shaves a small piece off the brick (which looks like it’s been treated this was many times already), and expertly chops the piece up into a fine powder, which he arranges in a line on the table, snorts into one nostril, and washes down with a swig of coffee.

“Dude,” one of the evening’s guests says, “what the hell is that stuff?”

“It’s pure caffeine,” Cabertoss grins, face twitching. “A friend of mine who works for the Princeton University Chemistry Department ordered it for me.”

“Dude,” the guest says, “I’ve got some speed if you need it.”

Cabertoss shakes his head emphatically. “No thanks,” he says. “I don’t do drugs.”

Ah, semantics!

An excerpt from my final Psychology paper:

It is likely that every single participant in Milgram’s obedience studies, and in the many similar experiments with similar results, had learned about the Holocaust in school, and that most of them would have agreed that the Holocaust was a Very Bad Thing. And yet, faced with the same sort of choices as the perpetrators of the Holocaust, they did exactly the same thing, made exactly the same choice, as the many thousand thugs, bureaucrats, functionaries, and collaborators who carried out the Holocaust: they abdicated their moral sovereignty in favor of going along with the crowd, or obeying the authority figure. They just followed orders.

This same abdication of moral responsibility is near-pandemic in the world today. Six decades after the Nuremberg trials, “I was just following orders” and “Everyone was doing it” still remain the twin battle-cries of evildoers all over the world – perhaps more so than ever.

These craven excuses didn’t hold up at Nuremberg, and I’m fairly sure that they hold up even more poorly in the eyes of God. An abdication of moral responsibility is an abdication of the soul. A person who is prone to this sort of abdication can never be a truly good person. Even if such a person’s behavior has never been explicitly evil, it is not because the person is virtuous, but only because no mob or authority figure has yet given them the necessary orders.

Passivity is a far cry from goodness. Virtue and goodness are active states, requiring a conscious and continuous commitment to maintaining a sense of full responsibility for one’s every choice, one’s every action and inaction, in every moment.

I got an A. I had good teachers this semester.

Two weeks until summer classes start.