Jin's PSE Final Essay

Pressure? Not a bad thing

Nowadays, more and more people realized that pressure is a necessary element for a society to advance. However, a few people still argue that pressure shouldn’t be a positive effect of a society. This essay will discuss the link between pressure and society advance, and show how different kinds of pressure accelerate the pace of development of a society.

Pressure can be divided into various aspects, for example increasing demand of people in a society could be seen as a kind of pressure. All the different kinds of pressure together affect on a society, accelerate it or even destroy it. While sociologists were trying to find the correlation between pressure and society, this issue has derived a few debates in these years, such as a wide-range debate about human right which is attributable to the one-child policy in China and a few countries.

Sometimes, pressure probably could ruin the creation, this is a main reason that why some people argue against the pressure. From these people’s idea, pressure on a society such as high competition or scarcity of resource made a more pessimistic prospective rather than positive aspect. Moreover, high social pressure also affected many facets: The fist and fundamental facet is education, as we know, less students choose to learn an artistic subject. This relates to the gradual disappearance of some traditional arts, like a few traditional operas in China. True, students choose their subjects or hobbies to find a good job in the future. This kind of phenomenon which is associated with less creativity is inevitable, what we only can do is to reduce the pressure on next generation as much as we can. The second facet is economy, one of the most important facets. High pressure in forms of unemployment or wealth gap could affect the stability of a society. Compare a country in a good economic condition such as US with a country in a poor situation, rich country always more stable than latter one. The third facet is the population which is more controversial. Looking at China who has the largest population in the world, population left the government a tough problem to deal with. Since 1990s, China have carried out the one-child policy to relieve the population problem whereas many people in west countries criticize that it goes against the human right. Actually, China has suffered from the scarce resource which dues to the large population. However, this seems can not be a reason that there is not enough human right in China.

Facing the population problem, China still gave a satisfied answer. One-child policy truly reduced the growing rate of population. Not only one-child policy, but also great breakthrough in agriculture field, such as hybrid rice and recent supper-hybrid rice. In one word, the development of China is amazing though under pressure. Pollution can be other pressure on a society, like chemistry pollution, air pollution, global warming and so forth. Most of pollutions previous can relate to energy problem. If we assume that coal or oil wouldn’t cause pollution, would we start to explore new sustainable energies? Before scientists and greeners have focused on renewable energies such as solar energy, wave energy, wind energy, the whole world had suffered from the global warming and water pollution for a long period of time. Obviously, pollution pressure forced society to advance otherwise it would fall down. There is a typical example: UK has made efforts on wild plants and animals protecting, it has carried out a few regulations, such as United Kingdom legislation for plant protection. However, a century ago, almost all wild animals have been killed. Although people started to protect wild animals and wild plants, the wild species still were hard to back. The information above shows that different kinds of pressure force a society to change and advance.

We also need to look at different parts of a society. Economy is a factor that we can’t ignore. According to Mankiw(1992), economy is a subject to find a good way to allocate the scarce resource. Resource is finite, human’s want is infinite, so pressure is essentially the confliction between human’s needs and scarce resource. Take an important index of government statistics—— the unemployment rate. “unemployed people often create their own jobs. To make ends meet, be productive, and sometimes to stave off boredom, many unemployed try to apply their skill sets to find new things to do.”(Finance and Economics, 2003) Unemployment keeps people in a society more competitive. A society can’t develop without pressure, the most tragic example is China, a 5000-year historical country. Looking over the history of China, too much relaxed society leaded to a corrupt society with no competitive power. This maybe is the main reason that such a large country would be defeated by smaller countries. Competition causes pressure, whist pressure causes advance, Darwin(1895) found that competitive environment accelerates the evolution of species. “Species which can’t adapt the harsh environment would be washed out.”(Darwin, 1985) The same as a society, pressure makes a society keeping advanced and competitive. There will be a circulation: pressure accelerates the development of a society. Conversely, the development of society causes pressure. This circulation could be the only force that could push the whole world developing step by step.

Society is advancing with pressure. A society goes without pressure would fall down itself or be eaten by other society ultimately. So, we should keep a positive and competitive value to challenge the pressure in the future whatever for a society itself or individuals ourselves.

Reference:

Wilkinson M, Environment Editor, Population pressure takes Earth to its limits, October 26, 2007. This is an online article.

Lih-Rong W, Asian Social Quality Indicators: What is Unique?, Development And Society Volume 38 no. 2 December 2009, 297-337 This is an online article.

Finance and Economics, Scarce Resources, October 09, 2003 at 03:37 AM . This is an online article.

Darwin, Charles (1859). On the Origin of Species (1st ed. ) This is a book.

Statistics is available from http://www.jncc.gov.uk/page-320