Having moral courage.

Very few people have the moral courage to do what is right. People are afraid what others will think of them. I believe it’s not a matter of what others think of you but what you think of yourself that is important……..your self-respect. People might have integrity but might still lack moral courage to do what is right. Because they are afraid of the backlash they would rather close an eye and let injustice be committed.
People who have this character flaw of having little integrity are a result of poor upbringing where character-building was not emphasized. They are definitely worse than those who lack moral courage. Between people who have moral courage but lack integrity it’s better to deal with people who have integrity but lack moral courage. Of course, having moral courage can be considered foolish because you would be sticking out your neck. Lots of such people get into a lot of scrapes. I don’t regret my foolishness all this while because in sticking out my neck I preserve my self-respect.
Colourless people who lack the fighting spirit and who look for an uneventful, boring lifestyle would avoid such trouble at all costs. These people pass through life like a ship passing through the night. They never make an impact on the people around them. Their existence is of no significance to anybody so that whether they live or die nobody cares. Our existence must touch some people in some way to make our short time on earth worth it. Life as it is, is already existentialistic in nature
For the benefit of the uninitiated, let me briefly explain the very complicating philosophy of existentialism but to put it in a nutshell the existentialists subscribe to the idea that the world cares not what happens to an individual, what his achievements are, if he dies or lives. Death is the greatest obscenity as it steals from us all our achievements.
Basically it’s about individual freedom and choice. This idea was put forth by well-known German philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger; well-known French philosopher and Mathematician Blaise Pascal, French novelists like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Satre; the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard; the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky; the American playwright Arthur Miller and novelist Ernest Hemingway; the Czechoslovakian novelist Franz Kafka (sometime he is identified as an Austrian because when he was born Prague was under Austrian-Hungarian rule) and a host of other novelists, playwrights and poets. The writings of such novelists describe the angst and turbulent emotions of their characters so very vividly. The ideas propounded by the philosophers mentioned above should be read in order to fully grasp this very complicating idea.
I am attracted to this idea of existentialism because individual freedom is very important and choice is at the disposal of most of us. How we choose would depend on our psychological makeup and the choices we make in life would certainly dictate the kind of life we live. Lots of people would choose the road they feel is the safest. Foolish people would go for “the road less taken” (this phrase is taken from the American poet, Robert Frost’s famous poem The Road Less Taken). Wouldn’t the road less taken be more exciting?
The human condition is essentially sad. Could life even be accidental or could our birth have been a planned phenomenon of some mighty power? Whatever the answer is, since we have already been put on this earth let us live out our time to the fullest and do what we have to do to the best of our ability.