The Fear That Destroys
Throughout history people have committed crimes while others stand by without helping. Society has placed this quality upon people, and pushes them to do what it thinks is the best. This quality allows society to take control over people’s actions, for they won’t oppose out of fear of being outsiders, or harmed. The responses seen in Fahrenheit 451 and Night, by the main characters, can make it evident that the fear they posses causes them to blindly follow what society tells them even if it means destroying something as valuable as a life, which leads to an isolated and chaotic society that destroys itself.
Fear can be a motivator of destruction, it can cause people to hide in the shadows, or to go against their own…show more content… In Fahrenheit 451, the response of the society’s fear of inequality, leads to getting rid of their source of knowledge which is books. While Beatty, the fireman in charge of the fire station, explains the history behind why firemen burn books and start fires rather than putting them out like before he says, “‘... the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’... wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours?’” (55 Bradbury ). The fear may seem unreasonable, yet it is creating chaos among those who want to understand it and those who do not. Those who wish to gain understanding become punish and everyone else lives about their normal lives. However, not even when life seems normal for people, fear still manages to invades them, such as when the Jewish community of Sighet became invaded by German officers in World War II and, according to Elie Wiesel, author of Night, “Everything had to be handed over to the authorities, under the penalty of death.”(11 Wiesel). Even though there…show more content… If people have a fear of not being accepted by society then they become bystanders like Faber, an old retired English professor from Fahrenheit 451, who told Montag of the time before books were burned; “‘ I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty’ but I did not speak up and thus became guilty myself.’”(78 Bradbury). They then start to blindly follow those whom they fear and become ignorant themselves. Once it is realized that what was done was wrong, it is too late to fix the mistake, and all that people can hope for is for things to correct themselves over time. However, things do not correct themselves and they aren’t forgotten. People are left scarred for the rest of their lives with images of what they went through. After the liberation of the concentration camps in World War II Elie Wiesel says, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”(115 Wiesel). Wiesel, along with many other survivors, could not forget what the had experienced, even as time passed and society accepted it’s mistakes. The past can not be changed, but choices can be made for a better future, in hopes to not make the same mistakes. Human nature allows people to learn from what they do, yet it
