What is originality?This is one of the fundamental questions
that very few people bother to ask.What is an original thought and what is its
importance?What people think and believe is affected by so many things that
after a point it becomes really difficult to separate the adopted thought from the genuine.
The fact is that there is a general level of
acceptance about certain things like if a politician says that women should not
have voting rights he would be shred to bits on prime time news because the
general acceptance in the society is that men and women are equal at least that is what
everybody in principle has to pretend no
matter what they think in their private lives.But if the same politician had said the exact same
words a 100 years back they would not have evoked sharp criticism only raised brows
may be and if he had said the same thing 200 years back it would have
uninteresting even dull responses because he would be stating only the accepted norm of the
society. So the point is that there is a certain unwritten common code of acceptable behavior which the
society follows and it cant be codified
But fast forward 200 years and the accepted norms are
changed.The question arises how do these changes arise and why do we as a
citizen blindly follow the accepted norms the prevailing society.If for example
a person holds the opinion of equality of men and women because it is what everyone
says .Should that person get credited for holding such broad views about women or is he merely a function of the society that he is born in ?.It raises the serious question whether our thought is only reliant on the prevailing society or are capable of independent thought process of our own?And if so where does our influences end and original thought begin?