We Are Victims of Our Own Society

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. ~James Joyce

(FYI: I was too afraid to publish this post while in China.)
Today I discussed with my teacher people’s perception of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. (For those who are unfamiliar, Mao led the communist party to victory in 1949. He was also responsible for the Cultural Revolution, a period of cultural reeducation. After Mao’s death in 1979, Deng Xiaoping began a period of reform and was the first to open China’s borders, bringing about a market economy.)
To this day, Mao’s portrait hangs at the entrance to the Forbidden Palace, honoring his life’s work. His life work which includes the spontaneous doubling of the Chinese population in the 40’s, which led to a subsequent starvation of thousands and resulted in today’s One Child Policy; accomplishments which include the destruction of literature and the brain washing of students by limiting schools to using textbooks written by Chairman Mao. This man is still considered by some as a deity.

This is the power of education and the danger of misinformation. A generation of students was raised on Mao’s textbooks, and even now in today’s relatively liberalized China, they remain influenced by the concepts ingrained into their past minds. Information is a tricky thing. Without the proper education, it can be misinterpreted. As an American, I cannot easily see America’s faults. We are a nation of consumerism to the point that nothing seems to exist without yielding profit. As my mom shrewdly pointed out, the Chinese media may be restricted, but American media is influenced by the invisible iron fist of money. Oil cartels loom in the background. Swine flu was changed to H1N1 so that the pork industry would not lose consumers. Yet to me, this seems normal. I am jaded, and I turn a blind eye to what I cannot control. But when I cannot log on to facebook, when I hear the Chinese biased points of view, I am livid. I do not understand how they can be so compliant, and the whole time I forget my own acquiescence to the faults of my nation. There lies the interesting aspect of knowledge; the more you have of it, the more you realize you have nothing to boast about. It is as if in trying to dispel your ignorance, it only grows larger before your eyes. You become aware of how much you do not know and how little right you have to criticize others. The knowledge attributed to us by our society is the nets we fly by. Some parts of the web tie us to our biased opinions; some restrict our vision, preventing us from seeing what lies above the clouds. The ropes are thin, granting the illusion of autonomy, but we have long ago learned to fly within their bounds.