Assignment: Is conscience a more powerful motivator than money, fame or power?
Greed is an irremovable part of human nature, and sometimes it seems like we human beings never cease to desire for things we don’t have. However, I believe most of the people do not let these ugly wishes to dominate them. Instead, they choose to act rather altruistically according to their conscience. Throughout human history, this kind of behavior has been shown by numerous individuals in both real life and literature.
One good example of such an individual is Professor Jonas Salk from United States of America. He was the one who have discovered and developed the first successful vaccine to Polio, which was considered as a disastrous disease before and has killed and crippled innumerable people around the world. Professor Jonas Salk was none at all interested in wealth. Although the sale of the patent to a medicine company could’ve made him a millionaire in a split second, he refused all the offers. By doing so, he has enabled the vaccine to be manufactured with a low cost, and thus allowed more people to have access to the vaccine. We can never deny the fact that his selfless action has played a great role in eradicating Polio in most of the countries and saving millions of lives.
As in real life, there are many such altruistic individuals in the literature as well. Take the case of Ursula Iguaran, a character from the ever acclaimed novel, One Hundred Years of Solicitude. In the novel, a complete stranger asks Ursula to take care of bags of gold coins for him which he would come back for in the future. Ursula does this by burying them deep in her garden. Despite her own financial hardships from lack of customers in her business and other catastrophes, Ursula never lays a finger on the gold coins. Later in the novel she is constantly pestered by other characters who have heard about the gold coins and desire to know where they are. However, Ursula keeps the location of the coins to herself only until her death, resolutely believing that the coins rightfully belong to the stranger, despite he hasn’t come back for them for decades.
Although material prosperity is important, conscience still has more clout in human beings. The destruction from the feeling of guilt one faces when one defies one’s conscience is well illustrated in the novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Dostoyevsky. This is probably why conscience still prevails in the corrupt world we live in today.
That’s 413 words in total. I am very eager to hear about any comments and opinions on it.
Thank you in advance!