"Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
Emerson said this over a hundred years ago and yet it still seems to hold true today. Nowadays we live in a time where things are becoming less and less private. With the advent of the Internet and many social networking sites, we can hardly keep anything to ourself anymore. If some celebrity does something that was not predictable of them, it is only a matter of hours until it becomes headline news on the cover of some tabloid or gossip magazine. Things that are fundamentally supposed to be between two people such as email, or even the low tech version, letters, are subject to the prying eyes of protective parents or invasive postmen. Our society has become one that is primarily based on personal gain. Many times this gain can come in less that savory ways and at the sacrifice of good ethics and morals. The personal term "confidante" has virtually disappeared from our vocabulary because of the fact that things presumably told in confidence often become common knowledge in no time at all. In this sense Emerson's words ring true because the only place you can truly keep things private is within your own mind where it is not subject to outside interference. On another level, the mind is a sanctuary from pain for virtually every person. When you get hurt emotionally, you look inside yourself for solace, whether it be for memories of happier times or simply to empty your consciousness of all thoughts in order to relax. When you get hurt physically there is a biological response of your body to not feel the pain immediately in order to preserve some clarity of mind. This is especially true with trauma to the head where the body's natural response is to lose conciousness in order to protect the mind from the overflow of pain in the body. Your mind goes within itself and puts up a wall of sorts in order to protect itself. Even your body on the most carnal and instinctive level holds the mind as a higher entity than the body, and so tries to protect the mind over all else. I believe this is why many people consider the most brutal way of killing someone to be an execution style gunshot to the head. This is because this method of death attacks the mind almost directly while bypassing the majority of the body. Unlike a poison which takes an almost circuitous route through organs and tissue, the gunshot takes the shortest possible path to destroy our last sanctuary in life.That is why this type of killing has such an effect on men in war, because whther or not they know it consciously, everyone thinks of the head and the mind as the most important part of the body.
1 comment:
It is true. There is very little left in the world that you can keep private. To me, this raises some general questions. What would you do to stop this trend? Can it be stopped? Can we have the internet, email, etc. and still have privacy? This could be a serious problem in the future with things such as hacking and identity theft.
Justin, you say that, "the only place where you can truely keep things private is within your own mind." This statement proves to be true everyday; whether it is with regard to politics, the media, or one's personal life. This topic also goes along with what Emerson says in his essay about Frienship. Emerson says that friends should be one's "undermost garments" but most of the time, they are the ones that reveal this personal information to the public. These friends start out so close with the individual that the individual reveals everything to the friends who then could choose to reveal that information for some individual gain. How do you think one should deal with situations like that? Does this thought suggestive one should be more careful even around close friends? Do you think this contradicts Emerson?
Lastly, it is amazing how Emerson had the foresight to somewhat see this coming living in a time with no electronic communication. This just shows how smart he was and how he had a unique perspective on life that most people didn't have until after his life.
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