“What does you gut instinct say about a lawyer who is paid an average of a quarter of a million dollars for a year’s work in which e puts an average of 2 innocent people in jail for six years each and donates on average 2% of er income (5000 dollars) to buying mosquito nets for third world children, saving on average 10 lives?”
You are forgetting the lawyer works to uphold the status quo. If that status quo (“the system”) also makes arms dealers reach and invades third world countries or does other despicable things, the net effect of the lawyers actions can still be negative. Think about it as different math operators. You can name a number as big as you want but if I can change the sign of it, it will always be smaller than my small positive number.
“You seem to be considering the absolute worst case scenario, and adding in extraneous considerations to unfairly sway the argument to your side.”
I was thrown a bit off balance by the pejorative “marxist propaganda”. I don’t want to post too much politics in this thread so this will be my last contribution.
It is very likely you did not need glasses. But now that your eyes are used to them you probably need them. What was happening was your eyes adjusted to your way of life. If you would have reacted better to the signal your eyes were giving you, you would have started to focus more on things in the distance and then switch to things closer by, retraining your eyes. My eyes are not accommodating very well either, but one eye is in far mode and the other in near more, so I can see reasonably well at all distances. It is no surprise that for both eyes the optimal distance is the distance to a computer screen. A matter of adjustment. I need to go out more.
Your problem seems to be not with your eyes but with yielding to social pressure, even when that pressure is in the wrong direction. It is almost impossible to resist social pressure except by removing yourself from bad company. Since you’re a student you probably spend a lot of time in an extremely bad social environment, academia. It has a medieval guild like hierarchical structure, where only those who have a title have the option of lowering or rising someone else’s status. But the titles themselves mostly don’t reflect the owner’s capacities. They are the result of a process of elimination and backstabbing that leaves only the most narrow minded and socially inadequate, so that those then grab the positions of power. It is a shame this culture keeps on deranging our youth, makes it a prerequisite to do almost anything. I have a friend who thinks he has Asperger’s syndrome, but in reality he is one of the very few I know of in academia who has a normally functioning social awareness. The bad environment has made him doubt his own mental disposition, though. This is how bad it gets.
If you’d follow my advice, remove yourself from unhealthy environments, environments that restrict your creativity by limiting your options to those that serve the status quo, however corrupt it is, you will suffer in other ways. Society has a way to exclude people and humiliate them by forcing them into useless activity, if people don’t agree with the prevailing mentality. But what are the victories of the rulers and status seekers worth if they handicap the competition this way?
Whether you will continue to self-deceive in order to fit in and acquire status, or whether you will give that all up and try to attain clarity and vision, it is your choice. Both paths can be very hard.