Socrates Was Lazy

Socrates

I know that we're all supposed to revere Socrates and think of him as a great and wise thinker, but honestly I think he was kind of dumb.  He taught his students how to think for themselves, but when he was punished for it he accepted his punishment with only a small fight.  I cannot respect anybody, especially somebody who I am supposed to admire, who does not stand up for what they believe in.

John Locke

Sure, Socrates thought he was being a stand up guy when he accepted his death penalty.  He looked at it as a service to his community.  He had abided by the laws, therefore accepting the social contract, for his whole life, so the way he looked at it was that he could not stop at the very end of it.  He wanted to die a law abiding citizen, but I think that Socrates had every right to fight against his punishment and my reason can be explained best by the lovely John Locke.

Locke was way smarter than Socrates.  In his Second Treatise he wrote that by living in a community you give tacit consent to its government and laws.  In Locke's social contract you should abide by a community's laws unless you disagree with them; a person has every right to break the law as long as it serves society in a helpful and progressive way.  According to Locke revolution is a right and sometimes even an obligation.

MLK and Malcolm X

While I do not think that we need a revolution at the moment, we do need activism.  Much like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Malcolm X's The Ballot or the Bullet, it is incredibly important that people write about what they believe in and fight against what they think is unjust.  Activists have had a huge impact on where the world is now, and will continue to have a huge impact on where the world goes.  What's really cool about activism is that you don't need to have a college degree or a successful career to have an impact on what happens.  Lots of lowly people are extremely successful activists that have had a really big impact on the world, including college students.

One of the most successful campaigns run largely on college campuses went from the 1960's to the 80's, when students demanded that their universities divest from South Africa in protest of its system of Apartheid.  When the divestment campaigns saw success at universities, the rest of the United States started following suit.  For example, after Michigan State agreed to divest in 1978, the State of Michigan decided to require that all universities in the entire state divest from South Africa.  Then, between 1990 and 1993, partly because South Africa no longer had support from the United States, Apartheid ended.  Of course American universities weren't the sole reason that this happened, but college students had a big impact.

It may seem like there aren't huge issues like Apartheid for college students to fight against, but that could not be farther from the truth.  Here at U of M, there are hundreds of student organizations fighting for what they believe is right.  One campaign that I am starting to be involved in is a divestment campaign modeled off of the anti-Apartheid campaigns, but this time we want our universities to divest from fossil fuel companies.  Supported by 350.org, the Go Fossil Free campaign is being run at over 150 campuses and recently gained coverage in the New York Times.  College students have the chance to reduce our world's dependence on dirty energy that is ruining our climate, and I believe that we will be a large part of the solution.

Fighting for what you believe in is extremely important.  I know how cliche that sounds, but its cliche because its the truth.  Even if you aren't passionate about equal rights or the environment, you probably care about something.  Next semester, go to Winterfest and find an organization that you identify with.  We cannot have a world full of people like Socrates who accept their punishment with only a small fight.