Give and Take: Scientific or Spiritual?

A good friend of mine has been preaching about the concept of “give and take” for as long as I can remember. The concept by itself is simple and depending on one’s explanation, lies either on the scientific or spiritual realm. Starting with the scientific one, I am sure many of you have heard about the term ‘opportunity cost’ sometime during your academic or working life. It is the value of the next best alternative foregone as the result of making a decision. When you decide to use a plot of land to build your fertilizers factory for example, you forego the opportunity of using that same plot for other uses.

As for spiritual one, many seniors would probably have told you about yin and yang, karma and its related stuffs. If you explore and analyze them thoroughly, you will conclude that they are all about balance. In essence, when you take something from another party, you have to give up something to another party and vice versa over a timeline that can range from a fraction of seconds to years.

Being educated and all however do not mean that I support the scientific explanation over the spiritual one. Although I think I should, I can’t because at times, I still hope to rely on the spiritual to explain certain situations. Well, that’s human’s selfish nature for you. The explanation we choose to believe in depends very much on our intention: be responsible for our actions or not. And when it is the latter, the hot favorite appears to be attributing those happenings to something beyond our control a.k.a the spiritual.

Here’s a situation I encountered a couple of weeks ago. I met up with 2 friends for dinner and on the way back to my house for a session of card games, we stopped at the nearby supermarket to purchase drinks. Since it would take no more than 10 minutes, we decided not to waste any parking coupon which was worth 50 cents each. We entered the supermarket and proceeded to the beverages section, quickly selecting our drinks. Upon payment, one of us found out that we had been overcharged by 15 cents. After a long argument, we got the 15 cents and walked back to the carpark only to discover that we have been fined S$35.

If we wanted to take responsibility, we would have selected the scientific explanation, saying that the opportunity cost for not putting the 50 cents parking coupon is the avoidance of fine and since we have foregone it, we should accept the fine magnanimously. If we wanted to avoid responsibility, we would have chosen the spiritual explanation, blaming the fine on our rotten luck and perhaps retribution for the bad deeds one of us committed previously.

I leave you to guess the explanation we settled on. (Hint: There were 1 Indian and 2 Chinese). By the way, no prize for guessing the right one.