Ignorance In 'The Crucible' By Arthur Miller

Throughout humanity, we undergo standoffs amongst the issues of ignorance we find within our deepest cores. To be knowledgeable, is to be within understanding. Can someone show enough humility to own up to their wrong comprehension? When we come to an unknown idea or object there is a moment of denial, a rush of fear. And there is a fight or flight thought rumbling in the mind. In “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, there is a manifestation of an otherworldly idea of witchcraft. Thus, fear arises in the community. A domino effect of paranoia flourishes and backs turn against each other. This storyline is not too far off from a subject of conversation in an article entitled, “Are You Now Or Were You Ever” also written by Miller. When faced by

To bring out anxiety in people’s lives causes them to twitch with anticipation of the possible inevitable. As ‘evil’ rises in Salem, John Proctor proclaims, “For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now…” (page 120). Proctor shows that people flinch in thought of things new and unknown to them. Ignorance can generate fear, because when we don’t understand things, we fail to comprehend the truth. And this witch hunt, created in panic, tore apart the town at its most innocent parts. Being a time of strict religious value, the community turned against each other while shaking in terror of the devil. Any small fault was thought to be evident to the conspiracy of the devil. John Proctor’s arrest caught him in the predicament of the demise from truth and the cold walls of a lie. This dread he carried, stuck to the force of his lie, would surely burden his life long after. He proclaims, “...I lie and I sign myself to lies!...I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” (page 143.) To keep his dignity and to continually cower in fear of the power of his confession, he is

America was in a state of pure anti-communism, and suspected anything to be of communistic origin. Arthur Miller said that, “The object was to destroy the least credibility of any and all ideas associated with socialism and communism.” The air was hung with paranoia and no one was safe from this pursue, not even famous people. Arthur Miller himself was accused because he refused to sign an anti-communist declaration. He found that it was a demeaning, and was assured it would blow over eventually. But alas, he thought wrong. Columbia Industries turned his movie, “Death of a Salesman” into a fraud, by creating a short shown before his film called “Life of a Salesman.” Arthur Miller spoke about the creakiness of the floorboards in America, “ An ideological war is like a guerrilla war, since the enemy is an idea whose proponents are not in uniform but are disguised as ordinary citizens, a situation that can scare a lot of people.” In other words, what made this time most scary for America was the fact that your enemies look like everyone else and there is no actual factual evidence unless they go right out and say it. Which connects directly to how in the Salem witch hunt, no one was