Freedom and Deception

Whoever said “Ignorance is bliss”, I believe to be wrong. Would you still like to believe in the toothfairy? Would you still like to believe that the earth is flat instead of round? Would you like it if someone lied straight to your face just for the sheer amusement of doing so? To be truly honest, most of us don’t care, or at least not enough to do something. We generally figure that a person should ‘know better’ or that it’s not ‘our business. Over all, we’re a very closed society. I bet that once or twice most people have even though ‘but if I told the person, would they even want to know? Would you want to know if you were doing terrible at your job? Would you want to know if you had the worst body odor anyone had ever seen? Would you want to know if friends weren’t going to come over because your house was so dirty? Would you want to know if a spouse was cheating on you, etc.? However, it would be ideal to be able to tell a person the truth. As Arthur Scophenaeuer said, “To free a person from error is to give and not to take away.”The book “Animal Farm”(Orwell, G. 1945) I believe to be a great example of this quote. At the beginning of the book, the animals were trying to fix their system of government. They thought that what the pigs were presenting was the ideal form of government, and that they would be free finally, but slowly the system started reverting back to their original. If someone had thought to say something, than perhaps the results could have been different, but they weren’t. The farm went back to the way it original was, except worse, because of the fact that they once had tasted freedom and then it was taken away.It has been said that “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. If you just take a look at Russian history, you will see how cruel humankind can be when power is thrown into their hands. How fantastic would it be to have people who were educated in a well-rounded manner, so that they might be able to do good with power instead of cruelty?Freedom can be taken away in many forms, but people want to believe that they have it. People want to ‘bury their heads under the sand’ or ‘shield their eyes’ from what’s happening. Is it logical to try and free a person from error? Probably not. Will it lift something from your conscience? Absolutely. You will feel justified in the fact that you probably helped (or tried to) help a person to do better within their own life. We often feel responsible for another person’s actions even though often it’s not applicable. For instance, when someone strays from a viewpoint they had, you weren’t in contact with them for a while, and they changed their viewpoint. Some people feel like they should have ‘been’ there. They should have tried to support them and maybe their view wouldn’t have changed. When in reality, it probably would have changed anyway.In CS Lewis’s novel “Till we have faces” One of his characters tried to tell the other character that what they were doing was wrong. It wasn’t until the end of the novel, when the character found out for themselves, through much hurt that what the original character was saying was true. Would the character have benefited if they had listened? Most likely. This is often the way we learn things. A person will try and tell us that something is wrong, but until we learn the hard way, the hurtful way, we generally don’t learn. We’ve created too strong of an idea of what our world is. It’s our own pride that keeps us blind. We don’t want to be wrong. We especially don’t want to admit that we’re wrong to someone else.I’m sure many of us have slapped our hands against our foreheads asking why someone will go into patterns for a long time, especially women who seem to cycle into abusive relationships. To the healthy standard person it would seem logical to not get yourself trapped into a situation that would cause emotion harm. Lots of psychologists have done studies which can relate to the study of women in abusive relationships. (Hollis, KL., 1997) Pavlov did an experiment in which he took a dog, put it into a box, would heat up the bottom of the box. The dog would originally try and find a way to escape the heat, but as time went on, the dog would stand there and take it, waiting for it to be over. Pavlov opened up another section of the box where the heat didn’t reach, thinking that the dog would try and go there, but it didn’t. What reason would the dog have for thinking that it would be different anywhere else? This can be related to abused women in the sense that they will wait for the abuse, whether it be mental of physical, to be over. They tend to think that everywhere else will be just as horrible, so therefore it’s harder for them to admit there’s an issue. People could yell at them until their faces turned blue, but ultimately they won’t want to listen. They will want to stay in their own world.A lot of people within religion also like to stay within their own world. Hiding under a mask, telling everyone that God told them to do something. There was once a pope who said, “Even if there’s no such thing as God, we can’t let them find that out.” Aren’t religious ones the people who are trying to ‘free people from error’ by giving truth? Yet, even if they were proved wrong, they wouldn’t want to know that it wasn’t true. Yet another thing to validate the fact that sometimes the lust for power or money can over-ride finding passage ways to truth. However, to free a person from error is the ultimate gift that you can give. Even if a person isn’t willing to listen to you, it is well worth the effort. There is wisdom in what Arthur Scophenaeuer said. Some might feel that to tell a person something would be taking a piece of them away, when really you’re trying to give them what they’ve lost. “A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words." ReferencesOrwell, G., 1945, Animal Farm, United Kingdom, Secker and Warburg (London)Lewis, C.S., 1956 Till We Have Faces, United Kingdom, Geoffrey BlesHollis, K.L., 1997 Contemporary Research on Pavlovian Conditioning http://portal.psychology.uoguelph.ca/faculty/parker/Psy3430/Hollis1997Nov28..pdf