Work in progress essay for English. So far we've read Lord of the Flies, Night, and Animal Farm. The assignment: According to Weisel, Orwell, and Golding (the 3 authors), what lies in the human heart? You must assume that the person reading your essay is not only the devil's advocate, but is also ignorant and has no idea what you're talking about. This is the 3rd revision, I'm just going back and tying the books in more. Still working on it, but I noticed something: We're supposed to try and persuade the reader to our point, and they're supposed to flat out deny everything we say. My response to that opposition? Give ground. Seriously, I constantly remind them that it is my beliefs and opinions, despite that my teacher tells us that it is not supposed to be our opinions, it is to be considered FACT.
I'm really excited though, since he went over an earlier revision with me and really like it. He said I'm his only student to have a distinctive writing style. Bastard's buttering me up, but I still can't get over it since I'm a narcisstic histrionic prick
Iunno, I'm just putting it up to see if you guys can offer anything.
‘Shades of Gray’
I’m an existentialist. I don’t know what you are, but I’m an existentialist. I wouldn’t exactly call myself an atheist, seeing as I don’t deny that God or Gods exist, it’s just that I don’t believe in them personally. I don’t look to some higher power to find meaning in life, since I feel I have my hands full down here. If I’m going to spend all this time here, I might as well focus on what I’m doing now, and worry about an afterlife when I get to it. But hey, if you find some sort of purpose or comfort in a higher power, more power to you. Since I don’t have a higher power to answer things for me, I explain things with reasoning and logic, as viewed through the lens of my beliefs.
What are my beliefs? That’s simple. Contrary to everything we’re taught, contrary to the books we have read so far this year in English, there’s no such thing as good and evil. Good and evil, to me, are figments of one’s imagination. There is no universal definition of evil or good, there’s only your own.
So far this year, we’ve read three books. Night by Elie Weisel, Animal Farm by George Orwell, who still scares the crap out of me with 1984, and William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. Night was the memoir of Elie Weisel, who is Jewish, and told the story of his time in a concentration camp during World War 2. Animal Farm is pinpoint allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution, telling a disturbingly frank and truthful view through a group of animals on a farm. Everything in the book is exactly the same as the real life events except in name. Finally, Lord of the Flies is about a group of boys who get stranded on a deserted island following a plane crash. With no civilization to guide them, they quickly degenerate into savages, and several wind up being killed before they can be rescued. With that obligatory explanation out of the way, let’s continue.
These books steadfastly maintain that people are inherently evil. I honestly don’t agree with that. On an emotional level, people can be very bad indeed. Take Lord of the Flies, for instance. At the end of the book, only a single character, Ralph, the protagonist, shows remorse for what’s happened. In the few days preceding the end, two of his friends were brutally murdered by the dominate force on the island, a group of choir boys led by a malevolent kid named Jack. Ralph spends the last day on the island being chased by Jack’s band of savages, who burn down the island trying to root out Ralph. What did Ralph do to deserve such treatment? He tried to be a leader, which made Jack’s ego go nuts. That’s it. At no point in the book did Ralph make a bad decision, except maybe giving Jack a long enough leash to take control. So, it’s easy to see where Wiesel, Orwell and Golding are coming from. Based on their writings, it certainly appears that humans are, above all, inhumane. But looked at pragmatically, they make a lot more sense.
My personal understanding and belief of humans is that we don’t start with a blank slate. We’ve already got a lot of stuff jammed into our heads. We start with our instincts, and they’re the same for everyone. People who believe in the teachings of Sigmund Freud call it ‘Id’. It is this, the ‘Id’, which contains the ‘evil’ that Wiesel, Orwell and Golding wrote about. It was described in the notes on Lord of the Flies as “the anarchic, amoral, driving force … whose only function seems to be to insure the survival of the host...” As bad as that sounds, it’s pretty much bang on the mark, or at least that last bit. ‘Insure the survival of the host’ makes it sound like a parasite, doesn’t it? A parasite created in our heads when we’re born, one that we can’t remove. Put like that, it makes what Misters W, O, and G say seem like a pretty good point of view.
Before you make a decision, let’s look at the animal kingdom for a moment. Parasites aren’t always bad. For example, the bacteria in your intestines (I’m connecting this to my biology class now) produces Vitamin B12. Not only are these bacteria helpful, they’re absolutely necessary for human life. When my sister found out that she has bacteria inside her, she freaked out. She’s afraid of bugs. However, if she didn’t have them, she’d die.
The ‘Id’ is just like the vitamin bacteria. “… Insure the survival of the host…” Without it, we wouldn’t breath, wouldn’t digest our food, wouldn’t do anything. Beyond that, it contains our basic thoughts. People think that the thing that separates us from animals is our ability to be civilized. Wrong. What makes us people is the ability to learn. We start out like any other animal, with all our instincts present. The difference is how we learn. Animals, at the most basic level, react to outside input in terms of ‘good stuff’ and ‘bad stuff’. If you’ve ever seen, for instance, a trained dolphin, you’ll notice that every time the dolphin performs a trick, it gets a fish. It’s been conditioned to know that by reacting to the sounds coming out of the trainer in a specific way, it gets food. People are different. We still think of things in terms of good and bad, we still learn that way too. But animals have a single track mind. They can only see ‘good thing me now’ or ‘bad thing me now’. People are capable of thinking not only farther ahead, to the long term consequences, but also laterally, to how it affects others, and *not done with this paragraph yet*
These two entities, the Id and the conscious, are inherently at war. People think that the other thing separating us from animals is our ability to think and reason. Again, wrong. Animals are perfectly capable of thinking and reasoning. However, as humans we also possess the ability to have emotions. The Id is mechanical. It single-mindedly serves its purpose of preserving the individual. Our conscious, our civilization, is the one tempered by emotions, and in turn, tempers the Id. Neither one is the stronger of the two; they work together as a team to process information and decide how to react. The problems that Misters W, O and G talk about come from when the conscious fails to properly keep the Id in check.
Simply put, however, there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all in our head, specifically, our conscious. We are conditioned to think of it as a bad thing if the Id ever comes to a forefront. From the perspective of our humanity, our conscious, that is rightly so. When the Id calls the shots, things tend to go wrong. People can get hurt. That’s the central idea of Night, Animal Farm, and Lord of the Flies. Again, ‘… insure survival of the host…’ The Id has no concern for others, except perhaps on a sexual level. In taking control, we lose our respect for other people. In fact, the entire plot of Night is the degeneration of Elie Wiesel, as his conscious is ripped apart, allowing his Id to increasingly take control.
The Germans used the minds of their prisoners against them. They purposefully malnourished and overworked the Jews, causing the basic needs housed within the Id to grow louder. At the same time, they also did everything they could to take away their identity, their humanity. Taking away their valuables, their clothes, even their names were all meant to dehumanize them. At the basic level, they strengthened the Id and weakened the conscious. The Germans did their best to create a giant vacuum to suck out the human emotion of the prisoners and turn them into automatons.
The conscious naturally tries to defend itself, faced with such a situation. It withdraws farther back into the mind, one bit at a time. This gives the Id a chance. You see the friendship between the conscious and Id is a bit of an uneasy one. The Id takes every opportunity to gain control. It makes sense; without that wuss of a conscious in the way, it can act solely for its own interests.
In Night, the reader watches the constant struggle between Elie’s conscious humanity and animalistic Id. In the end, it is the Id that calls the shots; the conscious can only temper it. It is this tenuous grasp on humanity that Elie struggles to keep in face of the German’s tactics. The turning point comes when his father falls sick. At that point, he is faced with a decision: should he fruitlessly hold on to his father, even though nothing can be done to save him? Or does he cut his losses and abandon his dad, saving valuable food and energy for himself. Elie decided to stay with his father until the end, and only after his father was gone, along with everything else he’d ever cared about, did his humanity give in.
Personally, I think he made the right decision. My opinions (read: OPINIONS) stated in this essay may come across as cold and pragmatic at their best, heartless and ruthless at worst. I do not believe I am heartless or ruthless. I value human life, and humanity, above all else. In our exercise with the human resource officer and the people in the bunker, I kept people based solely on their humanity, and what they had done. I valued who they were as people far more then their possible usefulness in a post-nuclear world. I would much rather give people I consider good a chance then give it to those who continually do wrong. You could say I’m a little naïve like that. Maybe I am. My views stem from my ability to pragmatically look inside myself, and to accept what I find as limitations and assets. What I wrote in this essay is what I found; it is my understanding of myself, and possibly the people around me. The things I found contained much of what we consider bad, and it is the same bad that Wiesel, Orwell and Golding found. However, upon examination of their writings, one thing is clear: They, like me, found good along with the bad. Their writings highlight the bad, the ‘evil’. That is because that’s what they wanted to talk about. But throughout it all, there is also good. Nothing can truly destroy one’s conscious, nor one’s Id. They maintain a balance. People are not black and white. They are gray.
Wiesel, Orwell and Golding found things in the human heart, things that people hide and ignore, out of shame and fear. However, they, like me, also found a beacon. No matter how dark the human heart becomes, there will always be a beacon to light it.
