My Glasses - Ep 2

The speaker discusses the capabilities approach to understanding freedom and growth, emphasizing the importance of opportunities rather than end goals. They also explore the power of labels, using the example of first, second, and third world countries and how they can affect people's perceptions and self-perception. The speaker shares personal experiences of Korea's transition from a developing nation to a developed nation and how labels can shape national identity. They suggest that labels can become self-fulfilling prophecies and invite listeners to reflect on the meaning and impact of labels. Hi everyone, and welcome to the second episode of the podcast, My Glasses. My name is Mina, and I will be your host for this episode. I know last episode I promised to talk about the power of labels, and I will. But before we do that, I wanted to introduce a concept to you, and that is the capabilities approach to thinking about what is freedom, what is growth. This idea was given by Amrita Sen, an Indian philosopher and economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Now, he says that freedom and growth can really be achieved when we have the freedom to pursue all of these things, such as education, financial stability, and the opportunity to have a job, not necessarily the job itself. Now, this is different because we're not focusing on the end goal, which is probably a higher standard of living, and perhaps just better living standards. Instead, we are focusing on the opportunities to get to those better standards. Now, you may be wondering why I even brought up capabilities in the first place when I'm discussing labels. But I want to say that labels have a lot of power to them. In fact, labels can enable us to do something that we maybe thought we couldn't, and also limit others from thinking that they can do something even if they are fully able to. I want to bring light to something that we may have forgotten, and that's the terms first world, second world, and third world countries. I think I stopped using them in high school because in my human geography class, my teacher had emphasized moving away from those terms and calling nations more developing or developed, saying that these first, second, third ratings could make people feel like they were first, second, third class citizens. And there we see the power of labels, right? Harmless number, yet so much impact. Another change that happened when I was in high school was Korea's label. Korea actually changed from being a developing nation to a developed nation around my middle high school years, and this has had an impact on the nation, not just in terms of aid, which they got less of because now they were no longer in as much need, which the labels are supposed to help people figure that out, but also it brought a lot of confidence to the people of Korea, and it made them proud to be Korean, at least for my parents. There were also a lot of other events going out in Korea at the time, such as the Candlelight Rally and the successful impeachment of our president, and many more things. But I think another thing that really helped Korea change their perspective on how they view themselves completely was actually COVID. When COVID hit, Korea was praised as one of the best countries who responded to COVID. And I agree, as a Korean, I may be biased, but I agree that Korea did well and probably better than a lot of other countries. Now, that is not to say that Koreans didn't know this about themselves before, but in comparison to other nations in the scale of international world, Korea did not hold themselves as highly. At least in my perspective, I don't think they really knew where they stood and always thought themselves as we have a long ways to go, we have a lot of inequality, we have a lot of advancements that need to be made, even in the midst of living with 5G technology, a lot of people owning multi-millionaire homes. Where did this perception even come from? And I want to say, that's the power of labels. So when they were named as a developing nation for such a long time, and a lot of people in many parts of the world do not have the ability to go to other countries and see for themselves, compare with their own eyes, what the difference between a developing and developed nations are, the labels they get is their own world. That is what defines them. And a lot of times, labels can become self-fulfilling prophecies. How do they become self-fulfilling prophecies? Well, I am taking another class called Philosophy of Health, and in that class we discuss, is it real illness if someone convinces themselves that they have an illness, they fully exhibit the symptoms of an illness, but their brain waves are fine, they are physically fine, they are experiencing pain, they are experiencing discomfort, the same way someone with the actual disease would, but their body is perfectly fine. In that case, are they really sick? But in those cases, we also talk about the fact that when people are diagnosed with a disease, they are more likely to look out for the symptoms, and also, perhaps unconsciously, display and exhibit these symptoms. So I also want to bring it back to this theory that maybe the term developing nation puts a limit on countries, that they think to themselves, we are developing, and perhaps to the developed nations that they think we are good enough, what we have is fine, and kind of put themselves at a stopping point, a plateau, where they could progress so much more. So I want to invite you guys to think a little more about what labels mean, and maybe how we might have to change it going forward, or at least the way we use things, and what we really mean behind these labels. Thanks for listening, and this is the end of the second episode of the podcast, My Glasses. I hope you enjoyed it, and please like and subscribe for more episodes in the future.