Essay #2 Intro P’graph

A broken soul, in the moral sense, is just a few strokes of temptation away. Most of the time, this temptation manifests itself in the pursuit of power — a seemingly noble hunt, but all the while a bane of virtue. All are fallible, whether it’s the corrupted SMERSH officers within Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s momentous exposé The Gulag Archipelago, or the multitude of ethics-barren wretches within J.R.R. Tolkien’s pioneering Lord of the Rings trilogy: Saruman “the Wise,” Smeagol, Boromir, etc. It is a luring game which renders our moral compasses malleable, and allows the sneaky savagery of subjectivity to cloud our judgement, regardless of any preexisting purity. In falling for the sirens’ call, we are afforded the ability to separate humanity from the human, a recipe for unspeakable malice to come into being.