The Power of Literature:

Maximizing our Good while Minimizing our Evil



The power of literature to revolutionize thought and influence morality choices is often overlooked. Yet it is strikingly evident in exploring authors such as Arendt and Primo Levi. Their works illustrate the power of immediacy and attempt to extricate all who take part in evil.

The works of Arendt and Levi are specifically valuable in disproving the existence of a rational and moral order from which evil is a departure. Elie Wiesel, noble-laureate and Holocaust survivor, has argued that the most significant and powerful tool available for the release of human acts of goodness are words with their power to produce memory, and so, intention (qtd. In Haas: 227). In essence, stories or myths construct a world of meaning and reveal our true condition, instructing us how to live. They yield essential insights towards promoting human welfare in light of our moral inequality. Indeed, the ultimate challenge lies within our actions: either they promote or negate a moral system of living. In the end, are we willing to place morality before choice, even at the risk of death? Are we willing to rebel against injustice?

In order to survive, we must.

At first glance, socialism best mirrors the crusade for justice and equal rights. Yet, by its very nature, any retreat from this principle is a rejection of the principle in its entirety. In Under This Blazing Light, Amos Oz addresses the faulty nature of not merely socialism, but the concept of a larger order delegated the role of combating oppression and poverty:

"The origin and precondition of all socialism is sensitivity to injustice and hatred of villians. But sensitivity and hatred cannot flourish side by side...

To be a socialist means to fight for the right of individuals and societies to control their own destinies up to that point beyond which men are incorrigibly ruled by fate. It is helpful, however, not to lose sight of the fact that social injustice, political wrong and economic inequity are only one battlefield in the wider arena of human existence, and that we are hemmed in on at least three sides by our pitiful frailty, the pain of our mortality, sexual injustice, and the misery of our fate. These cannot be overcome by any social system... (135-136)."

Can one conclude that dependence on any social system for insuring good and combating evil is structurally wrong and overtly idealistic? Perhaps so. It is not that socialism is any better or worse, but that there are limits to an idealism whose rejection causes great harm to all involved: To be as different from one another as we wish, without oppressing or exploiting or humiliating one another, is an ideal formula which can be aimed for but never fully realised, I know. Whoever tries to apply formulas completely ends up manipulating people (137).

Indeed, the solution ultimately lies within. Therefore, humanity must reject the myth of an external answer to an evil which flows from within. The notion of a society free of all evil will remain a utopian fantasy until humanity accepts the individual potential for both unparalleled good and extraordinary evil. Indeed, precisely because this essential duality gives birth to all evil, the ability to combat oppression and inequality must emerge from within. The individual must destroy a piece of his/her very own heart.

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