The Crucible – Human Nature
Human nature was fully to blame for the disaster which took place in Salem in 1692. Human nature is what your character is made of in trying situations, and in 1692 scientific knowledge was extremely poor by today's standards and so all reoccurring problems were blamed on an evil force, whether it be the devil or witches or anything the imagination could conjure, hence human nature was being tested regularly. The decisions people made were critical to the disaster's progression, in today's scene in would have been dismissed within minutes, but the paranoia floating around in the town kept the ball rolling. People were so terrified of the thought of evil that any suggestion of it would create a preordained judgement in the mind of anyone, especially those who made judgement of the accused. To get to the supposed truth, a rather unjust system was employed. You either confessed to the crime or you were hanged. Now in those days this was not seen as a terrible injustice because of the hysteria the thought of evil spirits caused. Human nature was to destroy anything thought possessed or evil, to believe the accuser and not the accused, to be judged guilty unless heavy evidence proved you innocent.
In this story there is no real crime. A few children fool around with something they know is wrong, they get caught, but are not brave enough to take the punishment, and so shovel the blame. Now this is where human nature is responsible. The adults of the town believe these children and set about punishing the accused, namely death. Now had these people had the character to think for themselves, to judge the situation for the evidence alone, nothing would have been worth writing about in Salem, 1692. Instead these people were weak, they thought only for themselves, and as a result, a tragedy that will go down in history occurred. Even when they are about to be hanged, they have been found guilty of a crime that has not been committed, the people are still squabbling over their own situations, they are all thinking about how they will benefit from the situation. Midway through the judge realises his mistakes but decides he cannot let anyone off the hook as it will make him look bad, he has already hanged 12 people so he must continue, "Postponement now speaks a floundering on my part."
These people live in a struggling time when all the odds are against them, it is not hard to see why they are so eager to blame every thing else, but it is in those times when real character is shown, and apart from a few people realising their mistakes towards the end, these people failed. They did not battle to fight for what is right and good, they fought for themselves. They were a bunch of individuals watching their own backs when the village needed them to stick together. This is why human nature is completely to blame, it was human nature which caused them all to shift the blame and it was human nature not to stand up from the crowd and to show the injustices, to sit back and be another sheep. It is a lesson from which we need to take notice, but human nature will mean that if another atrocity of this sort occurs, we'll do exactly the same thing.
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