Why Are Most People Cowards?

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is a transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Why are most people cowards? Why are they afraid to raise their voice and speak the truth? Or why are they afraid to stand up and rebel against the people and the systems that are oppressing them?

Well the reason is simple because they have forgotten their true power. There is a great short story that illustrates that point:

Once upon a time, a man came across a magnificent elephant that was tied to a tree by a rope. The elephant was very big and muscular, and the rope was very thin and fragile. It was so thin that the elephant could break it with a single move of its leg. So the man was perplexed. He was like: “How can the elephant be tied by such a rope? What could be the reason? It makes no sense.” Well, the reason is this:

When the elephant was still a baby, it was tight to that same tree, by that same rope. Now, at the time, the elephant was very small and weak to break the rope. It attempted many times to break free from it, but it failed again and again and again, until a point came that the elephant gave up. It came to believe that it’s weak to break free from it, and, even as it was growing older and stronger, that belief remained in its mind.

Now, just like the elephant, many of us are tied by our limiting beliefs. Beliefs of being weak, inadequate, unimportant, even stupid. Beliefs that were instilled in us when we were little kids.

For example, many of us grew up with parents that demanded us to suppress our emotions and obey what they were telling us. Otherwise, we were made to believe that we would be abandoned or unloved. So we tried our best to please them, although that was bringing us misery. Because that was our copying mechanism, that was our way of surviving at the time. That was the best way we had to deal with the situation that we were living in.

Then later on we were sent to school, where we had to obey and conform to a system that wanted us to be good kids, that wanted us to obey authority figures, that made us think that if we don’t obey and conform, we would be punished, and if we would obey and conform, then we would be rewarded validated — we would be successful.

Then you have social media that has conditioned us to compare ourselves against others, to not feel good enough, to seek external validation through likes and comments, to try to conform to trends and to an image of someone who is supposed to be cool or successful. We hide who we are, we present a fake image — a persona — so people don’t get to truly know us. And we do that because we feel insecure as we are.

And then you have religion, which has brought up this father figure who is all-powerful, and we have no strength against him, and we have to obey him fully if we want to be rewarded with a good life and with heaven in the afterlife. And if we don’t obey him, then we are going to suffer and end up in eternal hellfire.

So, by the time we reach adulthood, most of us become conditioned to be conformist and obedient. And we have even identified with this image of the good citizen, the normal person who does as he or she is being told. And because of that, we don’t like it when we see other people rebelling, other people being non-conformist, disobedient, and we want to drag them down. It’s as if our wings have been cut off, and we don’t want to see them flying as well, so we try to cut off their wings too, so that they can walk or crawl by our side. Because they are threats to our sense of self, and they remind us of how cowardly we are.

But we are paying a very high price for that, because we are suppressing ourselves, we are filling our lives with stress, we are living miserable lives. And we allow injustices to perpetuate, we allow oppressive systems to continue, we allow violence and destruction to go on. Because we are afraid to do something about all the bad things that we see in the world, and that’s because we think that we have no power in our hands to make a difference, when the truth is very different:

We are like that elephant that has so much power but has forgotten all about it. We have the power to make a big difference in our lives and in the world. We have the power to stand up and rebel. And when I say rebel, I don’t mean being violent, exerting force over others. Rebelling can mean just speaking the truth, raising awareness about important issues, not trying to please everyone, not blindly following leaders, spreading kindness and generosity that are antithetical to what our society has conditioned us to do, which is being competitive and hoard things for ourselves.

You have so much power to make a difference in your life — way more than you realize — and in this video I just want to remind you of that. People think: “What power do I have in this world? I’m just a single person, an individual.” But the truth is that society is composed of individuals. So for society to change, we — each one of us — has to change. This is when social change happens: We individually change, and we take action to change the world. In fact, some of the biggest positive changes that have happened in the world were usually started by a few people, sometimes even by one individual. Which shows the power that each one of us has.

Courage is contagious. It can spread quickly like a wildfire. When we are close to courageous people, we feel more courageous ourselves. So living by example, embodying the change that we wish to see in the world, can have such a big influence on the people around us. But we have to start believing in ourselves, to start rediscovering the tremendous power that is dominant within us.

Now, I’m not saying that to affect change in your life and in the world is an easy thing to do. It’s not. To go against the toxic stream of our society is tremendously difficult, but it is totally worth it. Because this is the only way that change happens. If we don’t do anything, if we’re passively sitting in front of our monitor watching videos like this, then no change is going to happen. If we wait for somebody else to make a change, again, no change is ever going to happen.

We need to act, and we might fail, or we might not have a big impact, but even a small impact adds to the collective, It is very important. Every single act matters. So if there is one thing that I want you to take from this video, it’s that you have enough power in your hands to make a positive difference in your life and to contribute to the betterment of the world.