The Building of a Positive Personality

THE BUILDING OF A POSITIVE PERSONALITY The search for truth or the discovery of truth are both the acts of a positive personality. A positive personality serves as the proper soil in which to grow the noble urge to search for the truth, and through sound thinking, ultimately reach the stage of discovering the truth. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a well-known democratic thinker of France. He was the upholder of the rule of the people rather than the rule of monarchy. He begins his famous book, Social Contract, with this sentence: Man was born free, but I find him in chains. But man is faced with another, perhaps more serious problem, and that is, conditioning. All men and women are influenced by their immediate environment. Because of this, their minds become conditioned, as a result of which they are deficient in right thinking. A person is not therefore able to think realistically. In view of this problem, we need to rephrase Rousseau’s dictum: Man was created on the pattern of divine nature, but I see him psychologically conditioned. When a child is born out of his mother’s womb, he appears to be the embodiment of innocence. It seems as if an angel has taken the form of a human body. At the time of birth, man’s mind is pure. His thinking is as natural as it ought to be. But man is a social animal. He has to spend his whole life in society along with other people. Because of this, he