George Saunders’ Thought Experiment challenges readers’ attitudes toward culpability. Two babies were born into two families of opposite conditions.
One has high intelligence and caring parents, while the other has a slow-witted brain and drug-addicted parents. The author reveals the contrasting consequences when neurological problems happen to them. Baby One is likely to get appropriate treatments, while Baby Two is not and becomes a criminal with schizophrenia. Mr Saunders argues that one’s innate pluck, which wills people to succeed and conduct unique life experiences, is ceded to us at the moment that sperm meets egg. However, since we don’t expect a banana to lighten its inborn color, why is it so natural for us to blame Baby Two’s inherent problem? Mr Saunders believes accepting who they are, paradoxically, makes us more powerful. Constructing a monster to punish is ineffective.
Identifying and understanding what drives a person to become a villain is the way to develop a society with fewer tragedies. The author elaborated on how luck vitally influences our lives. “A fortunate birth, in other words, is a shock absorber”, said the author. People born with physical or/and mental illness into well-supported families are likely to overcome, while those into wretched families don’t. Birth arranges the well-being of a person’s life, from the assigned DNA to family support. Nonetheless, the public usually omits criminals’ embedded disadvantages and sees them as evil Monsters.
I agree with the author’s fundamental argument, “the emphasis is on seeing with clarity rather than judging”. Without knowing the root cause, it’s impossible to establish a system to help the victims of forlorn circumstances and fix problems in an early stage before they cause significant damage. Awareness and empathy are keys to finding practical solutions and sorting out these tangled social issues. Still, I do understand how easy to accuse the wrongdoers because I yearn to believe I earn all I have by myself. It’s painful to admit that relatively hereditary privileges contribute more to my achievement. Even having an extra mental capacity for empathy is a blessing.
My main point is not to exculpate those wrongdoers from their faults but to discern their accountabilities and figure out how to stop constructing Monsters in the first place. It’s easy to understand ten years old kids may misbehave. They need to take more education. Likewise, it’s unfair to blame criminals who never received the proper education and with weak cognitive abilities.
When weighing accountability, we need to take in one’s background. If one never knows what’s right or wrong due to the poor environment, blaming them is unreasonable. On the other hand, if one grows with adequate guidance, their culpability can not be waived.
My view, however, dissimilar to what Mr Saunders has argued, is that genes are not the only factor defining a person’s pluck, and the pluck is not the only factor dominating a person’s fate. More recently, experts have found that “genes and environments always interact to produce our characteristics” and that “both genetics and environment play a part in the development of personality”. Yet these studies also manifest how monsters are made when people like Baby Twos are left alone in janky environments, and their bad luck is unsurprisingly overlooked.
Moreover, I don’t believe that the amount of our birth luck predicts our ever-after happiness. Despite the bitter truth of social reproduction, being happy is a choice. People living in a wealthy country are not certainly happier than those in a resource-limited country. The ranking of the World Happiness Report is not entirely proportional to the wealth of the nations. People can find fulfillment in different ways.
Nevertheless, feeling happy takes work. We need to overcome our inferiority complex to gain it. Happiness is not the solution to these intricate social problems but can encourage us to face our limited life choices.
Most of us are mixtures of Baby One and Baby Two. There is always someone more successful than us as well as someone more miserable than us. Baby Ones can be Baby Twos when tragedies befall them. Realizing how lucky and unlucky we are, helps us see the causes of social problems more clearly, and it will guide us to develop more feasible solutions for everyone and, therefore, toward a happier life.