quinn essays

quinn essays the claim made by Teiresias examines the difference between right and wrong as if these two concepts are merely two sides of a coin. In reality, good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, are not so clearly delineated. Teiresias does not realize that his observation, if applied as a general rule, would create the disastrous construction of external standards for the individual to follow. Indeed, how does one know if he or she is wrong? The individual cannot objectively verify or falsify empirical claims when the circumstance demands submission to an external standard. Therefore, he or she must maintain respect for a dignified conception of individuality. What individuals know are conceptualized and solidified through teaching and repetition. Prior to the advent of modernistic criticism of society and the post-modern deconstruction of truth, people defined truth and untruth according to a traditional standard of verification and falsification. Sophocles time was one in which virtue was held to be the ultimate goal of the nation-state, and hence his prophetic advice reflects a black-and-white criterion of truth. Yet times have changed, and through reflection on human events, this criterion has been deconstructed. George Orwells dystopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four clearly demonstrates how the perception of truth can be formulated by neurological and psychiatric manipulation. Winston Smith had continually maintained his own standard of truth, that the individual is a dignified decision-maker. It took him much willpower to preserve the notion that two and two is four, when the state continually insists that truth commands that two and two i s five. However, the mental and physical force exerted by Big Brother finally induced him to believe that individualistic thinking is wrong, and that the only course of truth is to follow the collective. Big Brother and the rest ...