ever giving thought to any alternative outside of the shielded path on which they are directed. “People that do that are . . . so very far from distinction.” These people have given up their won right to think and have doomed themselves to lives that can never meet the full potential of the human experience. Stockmann ends his speech with a proposal “. . . to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of truth.” This lie that people are born into believing must be destroyed for the sake of the individual. If people continue only to do as they are told, and if people continue to tell their children to believe unquestioningly the truths others make for them, then individual rights and rational and creative thoughts will cease to exist. It is for these reasons that Stockmann makes his stand, that he proposes such a revolution. Only once Stockmann’s truths can be heard and analyzed can people begin to know what they were intended for.The idea that the majority destroys itself is so obvious that it is often over-looked. People refuse to make their own decisions about anything and instead choose to follow what others believe or what others say is right. People lose rights they never knew they had when they do things like that. In An Enemy of the People, Stockmann is the first to realize that he has his own mind, and that people who do not know they have their own mind are not really living at all. He is the revolutionary who allows people to produce their own thoughts and ideas and to have their own opinions about what others say. He is the one that sets each individual person free from the horror of a blind and mindless community of mass thought....
