Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." His insight can be paraphrased: man is born free, and is surrounded by walls everywhere. So many walls! And visible and invisible. Walls outside and walls inside. In the world and in the minds of men. Barriers to legal norms and ethical rules that restrict human freedom in society. Barriers from the imperatives of conscience and the dogmas of prejudices that take away his inner freedom. They are that unshakable "must" that the spontaneous "I want" faces.
The fate of man is to be surrounded by walls. They give him security and protection, but at the same time make him feel captive. They prevent him from going wherever he wants. They keep him from doing what he wants. They protect him, but also limit his horizons. He can't determine the thickness of these walls nor the direction in which to seek the outcome of his real or mental imprisonment. He doesn't even know if there is a door or he has to break the wall through his head. Doubt if he will succeed often makes him wait. Gets courage. Looking for support. He delays feats for better times. Times in which the walls collapse under the pressure of the wind of change or collapse eaten by the worm of doubt. However, invisible bricklayers are building up new walls in unseen ways. Obviously the walls are inevitable.
Building the walls from antiquity to the present day requires purpose, time, patience, zeal, and ... sacrifices. The most impressive wall The Great Wall of China was built as a defensive facility. Its construction began in the fourth century before the New Age to protect the state from the raids of barbarian tribes. Mission noble and justified. A century later, Emperor Qin Shuhang gave an order to join the existing plots in a continuous line, and those beyond the designated line to be destroyed. So it becomes a symbol of China's reunification. It crosses the country from the border with Korea to the Gobi desert and bends into a protector of 6000-6700 km. In places it has a width of up to 10 m. Its height is 15 m. Epochal! But there is also the reverse side of the coin. The Great Wall of China is also a symbol of tyranny. For its construction hundreds of thousands of masters, prisoners, soldiers and villagers have been mobilized. They are doing extremely hard work. Wun Lunhan of Sun wrote that the Wall is so tall because it has stood on human bones and so deep because it is soaked in their blood. They call it the "largest cemetery in the world". There, according to some historians, have found 10 million deaths ...
Now, however, another wall separates the Chinese from the world. They call it the euphemistic information eclipse. The paranoia of the Chinese regime vis-à-vis non-conceivable people and thinkers in general is a reason to censure ruthlessly and invest funds into technical filters restricting free Internet access. This virtual wall separates the Chinese from the world and closes them in the government propaganda cell. It is even more dangerous because it is invisible and encapsulates consciousness, namely it changes the world. Her victims are numerous.
The construction of ideological walls destroys human destinies. 1 September 1939 - the beginning of World War II, inspired by the ideology born in Hitler's sick brain. He raises a wall, dividing the people of the godly Aryan race and everyone else. This insurmountable barrier between people because it is stuck in their minds. The conscious philosophy, inspired by the German-exhausted people, makes him a sinister satrap. It raises not just front barricades, but also the inaccessible walls of concentration camps, where millions of innocents, who are accused of belonging to a particular ethnicity, are lost ...
The Berlin Wall, 25 Years After the Fall (source)
August 13, 1961 - a date that changes the lives of millions. Berlin is closed. The barbed wire is stretched out between the eastern and western parts of the German capital. Berliners wonder what this is! What is needed and why is it happening? Two days later, with a massive concrete block, 130 km of wall was erected. A wall that will twenty-two years blush the happiness of divided fellow countrymen. A wall that will kill. More dangerous, however, is the iron curtain that divided the world into two towering poles, and its descent triggered the Cold War. Even today, the world is struggling with its consequences.
The most durable and hard-to-reach are the walls in the mind. These imaginary barriers define the boundaries of our freedom much more categorically than the real ones. The first walls for each of us are the barrier of the crib, outside of which the dangers of the world begin, and which are overcome only by mother's gentle hands and dad's heavy embrace. But parents sometimes seem to try to model us in their image and likeness, to turn us into their spears and to put us in the mold of our own ideas. He sometimes is wide, and most often his walls press and sniff.
The barriers of etiquette rise before us as soon as we get out of the safe space of the home and get into society. All the limitations imposed by fictional and sometimes illogical norms stifle our spontaneity. They turn us into snobs, who forcing themselves to say what they don't think, wear clothes that don't suit them, strive for positions that are acceptable but undesirable to turn away worthy people because they are " below "their" level ". These walls prevent us from being ourselves. American poet Robert Frost said, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall". This is the man. Who will love the obstacles, restricting him to do what he wants? However, they help us to fit into a particular social circle in an acceptable way. Like the laws, they stop us from violating the rights and freedoms of others. These barriers are necessary to ensure harmony in society. Walls of prejudice often ruin our lives. How are all these prejudices built up? When we are grown and educated in a society burdened by prejudice, we often accept them without resistance and without critical reflection, without looking for alternative concepts of the world. Prejudices brought about by aggressiveness, conformism with existing social norms, or economic and political rivalry or conflict. Pretensions, deprived of logic, but saving us the effort to think, detrimental clichés that flood us everywhere, often change the trajectory of our fate, directing our choices in an unwanted direction. "Do not become a lawyer because they are corrupt!", "Do you want to be a journalist? Absorption! You have to be cheeky and you are not. "" Physicians are hard-hearted, and you are a sensitive person. Forget about the Medical Academy. "" Daughter, I forbid you to go out with this boy! It has one million earrings on the body. I've never seen you anymore with such people. They are dangerous and addicts! "" All blondes are stupid. "" It is all women's work to cook and clean while the man is making bread in the family. "All these summaries are walls. (Walls preventing us from fulfilling our desires, and then appearing as our hidden desires in our dreams, according to Freud. "" Are we wondering whether to include it? Or can you without it? ") It is strange that people take them as axioms and they do not even think about whether they are true. Perhaps because it brings them the comfort of thought momentum and subjugation of collective delusion. Not every repeated repeated lie, at one point becomes true. And creating stereotypes is not a way to simplify our idea of the world. Because it's easier and there's no need to strain our brain activity? This saves mental energy and facilitates adaptation. But it often prevents us from taking into account the individual differences within a group of people, preventing us from fully communicating and orientating ourselves in reality, which in itself poses risks and threats. Maybe when we are forced to listen to information unknown to us, we do not think about it, we reject it and ignore it. So these prejudices are rooted too deeply in our minds, which might be hard to get out of there. Especially when these unrealistic thoughts of ours are encouraged by the surrounding people, which can only be changed by means of a movie, book or radio broadcast. It is strange that this is the case today when we are submerged in the ocean of information and it is so easy to look for evidence of the truthfulness of these statements. All these stereotypes, which prevent us from orienting in reality, have obsessed the human consciousness.
Prejudices raise difficult barriers to communication. They distant people even when they do not speak different languages. The other, different from you by race, religion, sexual orientation, political bias is not just alien, it seems hostile to you, it seems to you to be dangerous. This justifies your hatred, which is often transformed by feeling in action, into aggression. Still, most stereotypes are not built on our practical experience or on the basis of general facts, namely rumors or thoughts arising as a result of our bad attitude towards someone. Yes, it is really convenient for us to consider the Gypsies as lazy and stupid, as justification that we have met only one (and is it really?) Yes, it is convenient for us to think that the place of women is in the kitchen, not in Parliament or elsewhere. How else will we justify the gender inequality? The only tare capable of destroying the walls of prejudice to the different is tolerance. The first step towards building it is creating mutual understanding. Is it not right to respect each individual as a unique being possessing individual traits, no matter what his gender or race or religious affiliation, to look at his talents, in his qualities. Knowing the other is easier to understand and explain his behavior. Even if you justify it and accept it, even though you do not think like it and do not act in the same way. The easiest way to break the walls is to get into an environment that has made you hate and despise. For example, you are being rescued in a cruel accident from a very random passage of rum. Then you will inevitably realize that the Gypsy also loves like you, that the Mormon suffers just like you, that the gay man shares your interest in the music that your political opponent also wants the welfare of his children, but he thinks he has to do it otherwise. The gypsy world is a universe with strict laws that we reject because we fail to get to know them, says Florina Iris. Or we do not want !? Try it! I think it's not that scary. To get to know one who does not have the same religion as yours or belongs to another race or just likes people of the same sex. They are not bad. They are people - like you. And who knows when you know them, maybe you will find a person very different and interesting than the people you know in your environment. So you do not waste anything!
The labyrinth of walls exists because there are countless imaginary prejudices, uncritically accepted beliefs, obsessed attitudes, mortal fears. And so we wait, hopefully, we believe we live while we are actually agonizing for a long time, stuck between our crushing walls. Is this the inevitable way of life? Is there a way for us to overcome ourselves, to free ourselves from the internal dependencies to which a person is subjected? How to get rid of natural and social forces, habits that seem to be our second nature? We feel that our freedom melts day after day. We constantly understand that the meaning of life is contained in the observance of external and abstract laws. It seems that the more we grow, the more we are stuck between wall-laws and lack of external and internal freedom. To keep family rules, school, work, to obstruct the orders of parents, teachers, superiors ... And they do not care about our needs, aspirations and dreams, even take away the right to express our opinion and us deprived of an answer to the most fundamental question, "Why?". Lawful walls are often insurmountable.
It is tragic that there have been times when, even if one even thought it possible to cross the wall, he was committing a sin or crime that the daredevil to do has paid for his life. The words of the Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci are prophetic: "Anyone who understands the walls will be buried beneath them." This is the case with the Germans who have set out to overcome the Berlin Wall to meet loved ones or to escape the regime in conflict with them. A concrete wall takes the happiness of so many people. It seems eternal and overwhelming. Like most walls. They are a powerful shield and a stressful threat. It's hard for someone to decide to break through them, and rarely will be ambitious to break them down. This requires reason and energy and, above all, courage. The hardest is the decision to proceed with a hammer to the wall. The choice to do it or not is fateful. It requires you to be fully aware of exactly what you choose, why you choose it, what you will change your life - yours and others, what you give up and what you get, how severe you will be punished if you fail and how much you will be rewarded , if you can stand triumphant over the ruins of the broken walls.
So many walls. Wall-laws. Yes, all people expect justice. Have you ever considered how society can create prejudiced attitudes through laws and traditions. For example, in our society it is often mentioned when the criminal is a gypsy, but it is never noted that he is white. This definitely allows you to create an idea of the number of crimes committed by blacks! Still, this one day changes. For example, I give " Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe and after nearly two centuries Barack Obama! Or the woman who, as a young person, is forbidden to travel in the same white tram, and now is the wealthiest black woman Oprah Winfrey. Jane Austin, who, despite being a woman and her place is in the kitchen, has not given up writing, and after her death she becomes a world-famous writer.
So many walls ... Elevated by the thoughts and actions of the people and destroyed by them ... And the truth is that we can think what we want without barriers, without limitations. We can say what we think. We are even able to do what we say. In our thoughts, we can ignore, overcome and equalize the walls that restrain our mind. We have this freedom! Only in our thoughts is it full and unlimited. But not from the ideas and the words inspired by them, the change begins ... and the exchange of one wall with others. And to fear them, and ignore them, they stay there. Still, do we face a wall somewhere and find a way to remove it, without hesitation we have to do it! Our life without walls would be better! And if so, drop by drop, this changes and every bit changes its way of thinking as the walls gradually collapse, I think the world will become something unique, indescribable, it will become a new, different from the current world , filled with happiness!
godflesh
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