Blinded by Greed

The prisoner's running with broken chains indicates that wealth is paramount and that society is blinded by greed. As human beings we have established a concept that justifies prisoners as people unfit for society, people that do not deserve freedom or opportunity until they have served a sentence of punishment for their crime. However, if a closer look at the picture is taken, it is noticeable that nobody really pays attention to the fact that there are prisoners running in the same direction as them with a shovel and broken chains. The characters in the picture must be blinded an unconscious state of mind. This scene is shows how the prisoners seem superior to the citizens because of their greed for wealth, which shows the id part of the Tripartite Psyche. Freud explains that the id is completely unconscious and a socially destructive force. The id will cause the human psyche to "aggressively seek to gratify its desires without any concern for law, customs, or values if it's unrestrained", as most of the crowd running towards the gold.(Dobie 51) Alternatively, the id of the human psyche represents the unconscious mind that defies judgment and reason about anything because of its urges. This sort of desire blinds you and allows the urge to possess you as if it was the devil. In this case the yearning is the craving for wealth and greed. As Freud describes, "it is only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle."(Dobie 51) In other words the mind is satisfied only when it obtains what it desires. The person will be very impulsive and demand immediate satisfaction. If it does not reach gratification, there will be some sort of discomfort. We can see this instinctual desire for greed and wealth is Handford's "The Gold Rush" as all the people are solely focused on obtaining gold. This gold indicates the control of the devil conscience on the right side of their shoulder versus the angel conscience on their left. It is not that people actually have an angel and devil along their shoulders, the metaphorical sign behind this is that the desire to become wealthy is powered by an id that can be represented as your evil conscience or devil conscience; blinding the people of the danger that appears in a prisoner uniform with broken chains running with them.