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Prejudice and the modern world

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The

latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to

hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

The question now rising is what exactly defines a GREAT SPIRIT?

According to Einsteins quote, which is relative like any other thing in the

universe, a great spirit is a spirit that stood against everyone, fighting for his

rights, freedom and ideas.

Along history, great spirits made extraordinary things for humanity. It was

them who gave us a better place under the sun and opened the gates to things

so normal to us today. What would the world be without the discovery of

fire, without the discovery of the wheel, without the discoveries and

creations of great spirits like Galileo Galilei, Da Vinci, Newton and

Einstein?

In my opinion, the things that define a great spirit are: intelligence, used for

good and for posterity and the capacity to go beyond the truth accepted byeveryone else.

What happens when the normal, mediocre man has contact with a gifted

person? Most intelligent people feel envy; mediocre people dont understand

that man and he is sentenced to a life where others laugh at his ideas,

consider him a blasphemer. Most of these people found recognition and

acceptance only long after they died, when humankind was able to

understand and accept their ideas and way of thinking. Envy and the

incapacity to understand a superior way of thinking and seeing things will

result in a collection of prejudices.

Prejudice is something so personal and so human that we cannot leave it

behind. In the modern world, it is a trend to say, everywhere you go, that

you have no prejudices and you are a free mind. The problem here is not

prejudice itself, but the way people think. Prejudice is a part of us; we dress

because it is a prejudice to walk around naked. The way we dress is also a

prejudice because it expresses the way we feel, the way we think, the group

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we belong to etc. Even what we eat is a prejudice, but these things are so

normal to us that we do not even bother to observe them. We consider as

prejudice anything that collides with our inner thoughts and ourselves. Even

worst than this, those things seem normal to us and other people we

encounter and get to know us better tell us we have prejudices. This is more

than a vicious circle and in a world where freedom is the product that sells

best, FREEDOM is not what it is suppose to be.

The freedom this world gives me is the freedom I do not want to buy. I

prefer living alone, reading a book, make friends I like etc.

Come to think about it, this is my prejudice. Maybe the world is not so bad,

maybe I have not paid enough attention to the world and maybe I should go

out more. Maybe the way of the masses is the best way to live and I am the

way I am because of my prejudices.

This is a difficult and wide subject. Making the difference between normal

and abnormal, between right and wrong, between prejudice and freethinking,is something so controversial and relative that it took humanity thousands of

years of evolution to realize that nothing really changed much. Prejudice is

still something typical to us, something so subjective and personal that we

cannot make a difference. The pain of prejudice and the fact that I am not as

free as I want to be, is often making me strive to escape and feel unsatisfied

with my condition.

Most of us have felt the pain of prejudice at different times during our lives.

Even so, we often delude ourselves into believing that we are personally free

from all prejudice.

We often make nasty or "humorous" remarks about someone's race, sexual

preferences, age, gender, body shape, culture, spiritual beliefs. We mock

people for the way they talk, think, act, look, smile, dress and for everything

they are. We avoid people for the same reasons, or worst, we avoid them for

their handicaps when they do not need that, and we avoid people for their

skin color. We may avoid people who are physically ill or are taking

prescribed medication. In one word, we avoid ourselves and we avoid the

way we are or we could be. Whether subtle or blatant, all forms of prejudice

harm our unity and prevent us from fulfilling our primary purposes.

So next time someone asks you to describe yourself dont start stating thatyou are a person who lacks prejudice and thinks freely; we all have them and

we cant escape them.