What Is John Steinbeck's Use Of Social Inhumanity

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Inhumanity is extremely cruel and brutal behavior. America has condoned the use of inhumane acts throughout the years. During the 1960s, John Steinbeck gave a voice to working class America to show how poorly treated the working class were. Steinbeck demonstrates the necessity to end inhumanity by questioning the dissimilarity in social and economic status in order to portray how individuals should correctly treat human beings. Steinbeck’s interest about social inhumanity first emerged when he grew up working in California. Steinbeck took interest in “the individual versus the collective” so much he “would sit up into the night and discuss [the] philosophy” behind it (Bloom). During Steinbeck’s early life, he was very observant. Steinbeck observed the details of individual lives around him in the countryside. As Steinbeck became conscious of the lives around him, he saw the immoral side of human beings. Since Steinbeck was not born into wealth, he became “desperate for money” and “took a job as a steward on a freight ship” …show more content…

Steinbeck believed that if “there ain’t no sin and no virtue” because he has trust in what an individual feels (Steinbeck 28). He does not believe there is always a good and bad social decision. Due to the extremely low pay for migrant workers, they wondered why they are “doing this kind of work for-against your own people” (Steinbeck 45). These migrant workers were cursed because they were stuck in a low paying social class to support their family. The landowners demonstrated a disrespect for the lower social class by giving the migrant workers lower pay. Due to poverty, people were selling their possessions to make any money they could to survive. Buyers were not only “buying (…) junk”, but “buying junked lives” (Steinbeck 110). After selling all their possessions, they represented nothing because now they truly had

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