Our society is scared.
I live in a world surrounded by
people who are ignorant from the hard truths of life. I envy those people. I would like to start out by saying that I
completely understand that I am only 17 years old and have so much more in life to experience. So as I say my whole spiel, take it with a grain of salt, because I could be
completely wrong in the way that I see the world. Who knows? And that is amazing to me.
Now,
going back to my initial sentence of our whole society being scared. I believe
I can say such a broad statement because I have reasons to believe it. There are many individuals inside a
society that are similar to me, and the term society is a broad generalization
of the people in our world. With that said, society has slowly been becoming
very scared of the world around us. We may enjoy watching the news for some
almost grotesque reason, and learning about the terrible things going on around
our world, but that is simply surface issues. The mind is simply the most
amazing “thing” in the world. Everything you see around you right now, is all
created by a brain. Our minds are capable of understanding truths about you,
and the world, that are horrible things. In today’s society, we have tended to
ignore these truths, and focus more on the positive, shallow things in life.
It
only makes sense to now explain some of those hard truths, in which society is
too scared to accept. A good, controversial truth to start out with, is
religion. People in today’s society are constantly fearing what happens when
they die. In order to cope with this constant feeling of fear of the unknown,
religion was created. There was suddenly a happy explanation for what happens
after you die. It would be crazy not to believe that! No matter how unrealistic
the story is, people were more than willing to accept it to the truth, as long
as this benefited the people themselves*. This is a perfect segway into how this
relates to a work of literature assigned in class.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was personally a life changing novel. I enjoyed the concept of Objectivism and
have become a big fan of Rand and her beliefs. I specifically loved the idea
that everything you do is solely for your own benefit. I believe that I found
that to be true before I read this novel, but after completing it, I had a more
complete understanding. This truth, that you are living solely for yourself,
could very easily be described as a horribly scary truth. This is why
Objectivism as a whole could never be accepted by the majority of society. Too
many people in our society can not accept that hard truth, because they are
scared to do so. Once you understand and believe in Objectivism, you obtain a
completely new perspective on life. For most people, they might assume that
this perspective is dark and depressing, but it is only what you allow
it to be.
*This obviously is a very small section on religion, but I
am sure that I will talk more about it before the end of this year.
