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Have you ever wondered how many contradictory thoughts or beliefs you have every day? How many times have you done something that is in opposition to your own principles? These questions have been stuck in my head for a while, ever since I read Edmund S. Morgan’s “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” This insightful article on how two conflicting systems as freedom and slavery could exist and thrive simultaneously in America during the Revolutionary Era reveals a paradoxical nature in human beings: we are capable of doing what is not in alignment with, or sometimes completely opposite of, our beliefs.
“Slavery and Freedom” serves as Morgan’s attempt to explain
“how a people could have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity” and at the same time “have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty.”
Morgan takes the challenge further with an example of Thomas Jefferson, who, though one of the most outspoken individuals on freedom and equality among the Founding Fathers, owned slaves throughout his life (Morgan, 6). This makes it tempting for us to simply condemn Jefferson as an evil person. However, I would argue that not only Jefferson but all humans possess the capacity to do contradictory things at the same time. I admit I have done it. I am certain that the readers of this paper have done it as well. We as humans are structurally made of contradictions that exist within our nature. I argue that there are two reasons for this.
First, even though we all have strong beliefs and a somewhat vigorous code of conduct in life, we fail to implement those when easy options come at us.
We all prefer to keep everything as simple as possible so that we do not need to put too much effort into doing something. This is why easy actions are so tempting for us. I personally despise products made by large corporations that take advantage of poor laborers in many developing countries because I believe in equality and I am against the abuse of human labor. That said, I still buy Nike shoes, Apple electronic gadgets, and many other products of other sweatshops out there. I do so because sweatshop products are cheap and available everywhere I go. It is obviously the easiest option. If I live according to my belief, I would have to do research on non-sweatshop-made products, and then go to more distant places in order to buy what I want. That is more difficult and requires more work. I want to keep things simple for myself. As I talk with more people, most of them admit to doing the same thing for the exact same reason as I do. It is simply easier. Another example would be people who publicly support others’ copyright, but keep downloading and using free music and books on the Internet. Why do they do that? It is, again, simply the easier option for them. It requires virtually no effort. Thomas Jefferson thought about the abolition of slavery, but why didn’t he make any effort to achieve that? Because doing so would require him to write laws banning slavery, and provide the means for those freed slaves to work and live in the US. Both of those tasks are extremely difficult to accomplish. Jefferson, naturally, went for the easier option: keeping slavery. When deciding whether to live according to our principles or to do the easier act, we humans go for the easier option.
Second, we are very good, maybe too good, at finding excuses and justifications for our actions and thoughts, no matter how contradictory they are.
As humans, we do not like to take the blame on ourselves. Not everyone likes to admit that he/she has done something wrong for any reason. This is the root of our habit of constantly finding excuses or justifications whenever we do something. What is interesting about this is the fact that we are capable of doing so well, to the point that most of the time, we give fairly logical and reasonable justifications for our acts. By “justify” I mean actually “rationalize” our actions, in the sense that we try to find a reason, even if we don’t really believe in it, to act as we do. If we go back to the previous example of why I buy sweatshop shoes, I do so because sweatshop shoes are often the cheapest on the market, since they are produced by cheap labor. If I choose to buy shoes at a non-sweatshop place, they are very likely to be more expensive, and I simply cannot afford such expensive products. Most people are not wealthy. For that reason, most of us go after the cheapest products we could find. I have made, as I think it is, a quite reasonable argument to justify my contradictory action of buying sweatshop products while detesting the exploitation of human labor being practiced by those sweatshops. There are physicians, though strongly against cigarette-smoking, are smokers themselves. They justify that smoking helps them relax and reduce stress, and therefore make them work more productively. Thomas Jefferson would have argued that without the existence of slavery, the United States would not have the economic means to survive and seek independence from Great Britain. And that would be a perfectly reasonable argument because most of the products the US used to trade with the British were produced by slave labor, especially tobacco. We keep doing contradictory things because we are able to justify it.
We as humans have in our nature its own paradoxes. The paradox of doing things that are totally in contradiction with our principles and beliefs is probably the most common paradox. Because it is inherent in our nature, it is almost impossible for us to change. We, knowing that as a fact, however, should not treat that as a norm. We should set up a limit line on how far we can go beyond our principles so we know when we need to stop making justifications and take action on resisting the convenient. That way, we could still maintain and live up to our lifelong beliefs. This, I believe, is the best thing we could do for ourselves and others.
