Power of the Hand

Animal Farm is a novel I studied back in High School, and an experience I found to be extremely fulfilling and important. It’s a novel that can really help answer questions about what our world was before the present in a way that is understandable to anyone from any community.

It depicts satirically the Russian Revolution but in the scene of a farm, using animals as the real figures of the time. A phrase that I found interesting and extremely relevant was the idea that the Human Hand is our most powerful weapon. Strangely, I had never thought to myself how our hands have caused destruction, death, chaos and also the amazing positive things as well. It finishes the jobs that we want done, and is used for everything yet it is forgotten.

The novel explains how without our hands we would be nothing, just another ordinary species in a food chain. However, I also see it as a metaphor for something a lot larger as well. Everything we want to finish or achieve is all done with common thought and instinctiveness. Such as if we want to pick up a spoon or a cup, we use our hands without even thinking about it. It’s already triggered within us to reach out and grasp, so we have forgotten how we complete tasks that may seem easy and obvious. We forget how much power we already have even without mainstream factors of money or assets.

Our hands have been the cause of millions of deaths at the present and definitely in the past. They manufactured weapons to use to make killing easier, and to cause destruction easier. It all starts from the hand, and finishes with the hand. I admit, it was a real smack in face when I realised this through the novel. Maybe I should have figured it out earlier…

This wouldn’t be complete unless acknowledging the great things we have also done though. Such as the many saved from illness every day, charity work that requires the hands for help and even saving animals and showing affection. Our hands are the basis of everything we do on the earth. They are our puppets, and we can make them perform so much and allow them to affect and consume us. The power is near infinite, and up to us.

Tools of destruction? Or the tools to save the world?