Personal Direction within a Distorted Society

-- By KevinS - 19 Feb 2016

The Role of Direction

After our first class, I left with an initial understanding of a lawyer, that lawyering is making change in society using words. And as a law student, I am in training to become part of the population that is charged with the heavy duty of directing that change. While one naturally picks up the technical "words" by simply being around other lawyers, I find the prospect of identifying a direction much more daunting and complex. Does the direction of social change point towards greater social programs or towards a fostering of independent liberties? Does the direction reflect a personal value, a community identification, or simply a result of path-dependent upbringing? One may preserve the inalienable right to pursue happiness, but can one's personal pursuit not be insidiously distorted by our surroundings? I admit that the direction in which I believe the world should change has personally changed for me several times in the past year alone. From what does one derive a personal compass and how much is it to be trusted?

What should direction look like?

While reading the rant of Lawrence Joseph's character, Robinson, an initial impression is that this man knows what he wants and how to achieve it. Regardless of how dissatisfied he may be with the criminal justice system he operates in, Robinson shows no hesitation in describing the murderers he defends nor does he hesitate to point out the dotted line between criminals and attorneys. If not personally happy, Robinson is at least satisfied with the direction of his own practice and its effects in society. This is how I imagine what personal direction would be manifested in the legal sector. Robinson doesn't care to have his actions and skill set be utilized and beholden to anyone besides himself. On a aside note, it's also painfully clear how disenchanted Robinson is with the legal system. I can only wonder if such disenchantment is the natural result of a personal pursuit in a direction against the momentum of contemporary society.

How can we develop a personally satisfactory direction?

How might one go about developing a direction that one can pursue with individual satisfaction, in the manner that Robinson does? Certainly, Robinson's character is well-educated and developed from a wide variety of experiences. Is one's personal direction necessarily a product of one's past experiences?

Personal Experiences

Developing a personal direction from personal experiences is only natural. We decide how we want the world to change based on how we've interacted with it. However, how much of this weight is unjustified and thereby must be counterbalanced accordingly? We may personally witness the mistreatment of a city's homeless population and calibrate our direction to resolve that tension, but we may just as easily witness a violent attack by the homeless person on a pedestrian. Given how biased personal anecdotal evidence is, the concern with developing a personal direction based on our experiences is that it's ultimately a matter of luck. While this may be true, I personally find this concept difficult to accept as a basis for how one develops a personal direction. One would like to think that the presence, or illusion of, agency would be crucial to the development of personal direction.

Discussions and Reflection

If personal experiences lack a sense of agency, another avenue may be through discursive dialogue and empirical evidence. Perhaps we never witnessed the plight of a needy individual, but we can be faced with numbers and statistics which give us an overall impression of the issues. Furthermore, we may indulge ourselves in discussions of the justification of charity on a philosophical basis. Eventually, after one has observed the discourse on an issue, one can begin to develop one's own opinions on which direction society may move towards. Ultimately, I also would have personal qualms with such an approach. Discourse on an issue, no matter how truthful or well-intentioned, is at the very least one degree of separation from the materiality of the issue itself. When discourse is further allowed to develop and expand, it runs the risk of developing into a distorting ideology, a creed that preys on the incoming generation.

A Tentative Personal Conclusion

Truthfully, I fear that I often fall into this trap. Surrounded by books and literature and thinkers, one can hardly be said to have room to think develop a direction that is personally meaningful. I admit that at this point, much of my thinking and reasoning will have some trace of what I have read or been told. Certainly, a "true" meaningful personal direction will be a goal that I will continue to pursue and seek, yet there is no shaking of the paranoia that one has not read or experienced enough. Or perhaps that one has read too much. If I had to choose, grounding a personal direction in personal experiences would be the lesser of two evils, but the result is a direction that frequently changes and sensitive to the present moment.

It's not clear to me what this draft is about. "Direction" in this draft seems to mean "a sense of personal identity, an intention, a purpose to one's life not assigned externally." The theme of the essay appears to be that this "direction" is difficult to have, and that its roots are unreliable. They could come from personal experience, or from learning, or from both, but for some reason I don't quite understand, our experience and our learning are "evils" of which we are required to choose the "lesser" in order to have a self.

Let's try to back up a step, determine what the theme of the essay is, and put that central motivating idea in a sentence. Let's use that sentence to start the next draft. You can then develop that idea through the draft, showing how you came by it, what difficulties or objections you think likely to be raised and how you handle them, and where that idea might lead the reader, in conclusion. With more clarity about the central idea and its consequences, a much better essay should follow.

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