Preference

Shylock, a famous character in Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare, when required to show sympathy for Antonio responds: Some men there are love not a gaping pig; Some that are mad if they behold a cat; And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ th'nose, cannot contain their urine: for affection, Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood of what it likes or loathes. He is really talking about preference which you may define as a psychological illness. But if so, no one can escape from the fate that they are affected by this illness. The reason is simple: every one has his or her preference and preference needs no reason on the surface, although I strongly appose it since personally preference is deeply rooted in one’s childhood.

Preference, to some extent, will cause tragedy. Teachers have their preferred students; parents have their preferred child, both of which cases would cause tragedy, surely.

On the Internet a photo was viewed by millions of netizens in which Hitler and Wittgenstein both appeared but the latter was sitting nearer to their teacher who is said to prefer Wittgenstein to Hitler who later trigged violent revenge to Jews because his opponent stimulated strong jealousy in him, which led to World War Ⅱ. Needless to say, this viewpoint is a little exaggerated but not unreasonable. 

Teachers’ preference does stimulate fights between students against each other. As a teacher, we should love all of the students in our class but to tell the truth, we sometimes unintentionally show some preference to certain students, which cause some problems among the class: the students will think that their teacher is not fair. Once they form such view on their teacher, they seldom follow his doctrine.

Parents make the same mistakes, that is , they unintentionally show their preference which would cause confusion among children and affect their mental state.As we all know, mental state is an important nutrition for a child’s development. This significant influence turus out to be harmful when they are in middle ages, especially in their marriage life. They would feel that they are not fairly treated and so they would lose temper easily and even do some violence. When serious, they would do something against the whole society. Generally, they have some difficulty in getting along with others.

When your preference concerns no other people ,no problem. So just relax. Some people prefer the Red Chamber Dream to The Story of the Three Kingdoms while some prefer pop music to classic music, it’s OK. Life is long and many things happen unexpectedly which help shape our preference before we know. It is a great pain to analyse where your preference comes from because it is assured that any preference is related to painful life experience,some psychologist say. I think preference is absolutely related to life experience, bad and good.some happy experiences also help shape our preference, not only bad ones. Few would take trouble to analyse where their preference comes from because it brings no harm and confusion to them.

But we really need to analyse this when we are in mental trouble, which is intended to ignore as in China it is regarded as a shame. If you are careful and really take pains to analyse this, you will find childhood life plays an part beyond imagination.So let’s pray everyone should have a happy childhood.

Prefer but prefer to a proper extent, OK?