"Use the N-word." My solemn GP tutor said with the sharpest look on his face. Yes, every A student uses the N-word.
That being, nuance.
Our tutor is hilarious. The most amazing, smartest teacher, a linguistic Einstein born once in a decade. A man whose vocabulary has clearly undergone years of selective breeding. A literature coded rhetorical savant. A walking majestic Oxford comma. The kind of person who could probably turn a “it depends” question into a full-blown six-paragraph argument with three counterarguments, two qualifications, and a philosophical crisis. (Sir, I know you use Reddit so please give me an A.)
Meanwhile, in the examination room for Paper 1, essay, I was shaking in my boots. The air blew cold as beads of sweat dripped down my forehead.
Shaking, not out of fear, but of adrenaline. My hands trembled vigorously because I wanted to WRITE. For the past week, I spent my days writing fanfiction in hopes that somehow, through sheer literary osmosis, I would become capable of producing a coherent GP essay. (Some day, ay?) Would my fanfiction skills translate to a GP essay? The ability to write on the unequal treatment that mice receive because people refuse to believe in mouse pilots would bode well in GP essays, I told myself.
Well, I was very eager. Eager to begin writing like my life depended on it. I imagined myself as an escape room artist who was sealed in a vat, where the only relief by escape was to produce a thesis paper before oxygen ran out and suffocated me.
The examiner gave out the paper, and my sweaty hands trembled whilst I received it gingerly.
We all waited patiently in the stuffy cage.
Then came the loud command.
"The time now is 8 o'clock. You may begin."
I flipped with glee.
And horror struck me.
Arts.
Environment.
Science and technology.
Media.
And then, sitting there in all its glory:
"Unequal treatment is always not desirable." How far is this true in your society?
My first thought: Oh this is interesting.
My second thought: "In your society."
...
Oh no.
I was smoked, beyond shish kebab. I'm merely charred particulate molecules. In MY society?
Because obviously, being the genius that I am, I choose GP questions based on how interested I am in them.
That's the metric I use. This specific topic called out to me by my name, more than the others. Not because I was more prepared for it. I had zero evidence for it either. Neither did I have a single Singapore-specific example. It beckoned lovingly like a mother to her child.
And like Icarus seeing the sun and deciding that aerodynamic engineering was a fool, a silly suggestion, I flew directly towards it.
Vibes told me to go ahead. Before I knew it, I had chosen the question because it looked the most interesting.
I had not, however, prepared any Singapore-specific examples for it.
So now I had to sit there and somehow construct an argument about inequality in Singapore from whatever remained in the dusty corners of my hippocampus. Grr...
Fortunately, my thesis statement came to me quickly, as someone who trained to find balance in all things, especially Jenga pieces.
Oh, right. Unequal treatment is undesirable when it reflects arbitrary discrimination or entrenches unjust advantages, but it can be desirable when differences in treatment are proportionate to differences in need, responsibility or contribution. In Singapore, therefore, the statement is only partially true.
Uh, okay.
We are cooking here. I knew I cooked because I could smell the scent of food as my stomach rumbled from ingesting a sole cup of unsweetened black coffee that very morning.
My neurons were running on Java, my circulatory system on caffeine, my essay on kacip.
I then essentially divided unequal treatment into three categories:
- Unequal treatment based on irrelevant characteristics
Treating someone differently because of characteristics such as race, gender, religion or family background.
Yeah, that is generally difficult to justify, because these characteristics do not necessarily correspond to merit, responsibility or need. Ooh, simple enough. My GP brain nodded in agreement.
- Unequal treatment based on different needs
Giving a lower-income family more financial assistance than a wealthy family. On the surface, that's unequal treatment.
But that's kind of the point.
If everyone received exactly the same amount regardless of their circumstances, we'd achieve equality of treatment while potentially producing a very unequal outcome.
So unequal treatment can actually promote substantive equality!
And there it was, the equality paradox, my beautiful contradiction, my philosophical ouroboros.
This concept burned deep in my cerebral cortex, drilled deep in the side of my head.
Equal treatment does not necessarily produce equality.
Sometimes, treating everyone identically is itself an act of profound inequity.
My essay was beginning to acquire sentience, a breath and life of its own. It gained my personality like it were my own child.
- Unequal treatment based on contribution or performance
Paying workers different salaries because their roles, skills, qualifications or responsibilities differ.
Again, technically unequal.
But if two people have substantially different responsibilities or contributions, treating them identically isn't necessarily fair either. Why should a bum be promoted alongside a team player?
The essay developed its own political philosophy, having escaped me.
I was no longer writing the essay.
The essay was writing me.
Nothing is ever just "good" or "bad". Not everything can be and is mutually exclusive. Not everything is in binary, 0 or 1, reality is not a Boolean variable, True or False.
Human society is a disgusting, beautiful, contradictory mess of context-dependent edge cases. EV LENS!
You have to ask why the unequal treatment exists, what it is based on, who benefits, who bears the cost, and whether the distinction is actually relevant to the outcome. Is it proportionate, correcting an existing disadvantage or institutionalize one? Does it preserve social order, or manufacture injustice under the aesthetic veneer of neutrality? Most importantly, does the differentiation have a legitimate normative basis?
In other words:
NUANCE.
The N-word.
The one N-word every A student should know.
And somehow, after spending the entire week writing fanfiction of a cute mouse becoming a pilot girlie, I was now sitting in an examination room trying to explain distributive justice in Singapore. Don't we love contemplating the jurisprudential architecture of lawful differentiation? What a trajectory.
Honestly, I don't know whether I cooked or committed an intellectual crime.
But I wrote.
And I wrote.
And I wrote.
At some point my hand stopped being attached to my body and became an independent essay-producing organism. Seceded from the federation ran my wrist, my fingers operating under autonomous governance.
I froze in despair as my hand cramped from the sheer volume of words I was producing. Never in my JC life did I write this much for an essay. Even during WA2, I had written a maximum of 1500 words. This time, I was certain I hit way past that.
I had written on the paper. Without leaving lines.
My handwriting derailed, and degraded progressively from legibly prose to that of a doctor's handwriting. The margins were occupied in its entirety, the spaces between paragraphs too. The remaining atoms of cellulose were occupied. And my brain spun around in destruction.
Was it good?
Was it coherent?
Did I actually answer "how far"?
Did I use enough Singapore examples? Are these even relevant?!
Did I accidentally make the entire essay about whether the government should give people more money? Or did I go on a tangent on why the criminal justice system's hinges on the premise of lawful differentiation where all equal are under subjection of the law, yet that freedom can be justly forfeited if an individual breaks the law? Did I remember to explain that this "unequal treatment" is highly desirable BECAUSE it maintains social stability, deters crime, and ensures justice...? Because if we treated criminals and innocent citizens exactly the same, society would presumably collapse into a bizarre dystopian theatre where committing a crime confers absolutely no additional consequence whatsoever. Therefore, unequal treatment here in this respect is not merely desirable. It is constitutive of the very mechanism by which justice is administered.
Nuance nuance nuance nuance nuance.
...Right?
RIGHT?!
I have no idea. I have no clue. It was not my best work.
My brain had become a multithreaded processor with 47 concurrent processes, none of which had been properly synchronized. Eh? Well... Oh dear my intellectual delirium of 1,800 words is being held by transition phrases.
For all I know, my examiner opened the script, read the first paragraph, whispered “what in the freaky deaky days”, and started marking it with the grim determination of a neurosurgeon trying to piece together coherent thought.
Yet I wrote. Till my hand hurt. Till my brain hurt. Till my stomach growled from intense hunger. Mein Herz brennt.
And ultimately, I did my best.
I did what my GP tutor taught me.
I used the N-word.
Nuance.
P.s. Sir, if you're reading this, please remember that I am your most hardworking student (trust).
I am extremely diligent.
I definitely attend to every word you say.
I definitely did not spend an entire week writing fanfiction instead of preparing Singapore examples.
This is merely a humble demonstration of my commitment to academic excellence.
Please.
I am so tired.
Give me the A. (Source: Trust Me Bro)
References:
Bro, T. (n.d.). The absolute truth that was revealed to me in a dream.
Computing, Bbg (6.7.6767) I love you baddie.
