Daily Ramblings

I do not know when I started thinking about stuff the way I am doing right now. I believe it all started during the end of engineering and the beginning of my masters education. Being the curious person I have always been, I have pondered at the true purpose of life. And trust me when I tell you that there is no real answer to that question. What I instead realised was that there was a better question to ask which can have a proper answer.

This is something similar to what you do in computer programming where even if there is no solution to certain problems, given a solution you can test if the solution satisfies.

“So what is this divine question” you may ask?

It is “How can life be made better for myself?” You can ask the same question in multiple ways like: “What would make me happier?” or “What would I want to be doing with my life?” or “How do I not die a sad miserable death?”

The only way to approach this problem is to figure out the systems that are in place all around you and figuring out why they were made, how are we supposed to be part of them – if at all we should decide to participate in them” – and what are their flaws and how to overcome the flaws.

Early on in my thoughts, it was evidently clear that most of the systems that we have in place are geared towards making sure the community survives at the cost of the individual. After all almost everyone will agree that it will be OK to sacrifice a few to protect the many. If not for that we would have never had wars ever.

A lot of my thoughts are going to be biased based on the circumstances I have faced, and I totally agree that people facing the same circumstances can definitely come up with different interpretations. So, nothing I say is absolute, and nothing can ever be absolute.

That is a perfect segue to our first basic:

THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE RIGHT AND WRONG

You must have already gotten to this without even me having to explain this if you have have lived life enough. I am still going to go ahead and shed light on what I really mean by this.

The rights and wrongs of a group are decided by an absolute majority at all times. If a right/wrong does not have a majority to support it, it will be abolished in time. You can think of the right/wrong as a law and that might help you understand this a bit better. A majority will decide what law needs to be created, and the law definitely should be beneficial to the majority at-least.

We have been taught – either directly through formal education or informally by how we see people interact with each other – numerous rules. Some cite cultural significance, some ethical, some something else entirely. It is mostly assumed that we are supposed to not question these rules, and questioning these will mostly have you silenced.

Lets take an example of a simple one of these rules:

“Do not hurt others.” – but as we want to speed up the learning process, we will go to an extreme form of that rule – “ Do not kill other humans”

In the initial days of humankind, there is no way such a rule existed. After all, we were the hunter gatherer kind. We had small communities and if you were to clash with another community, killing people must have been common place. With smaller groups control of people was easier, as there will be a single leader who shoulders all responsibility, and all everyone else had to do was satisfy the role they were assigned.

As humankind started farming, and huge human settlements were formed, controlling people would definitely have been difficult, so the leaders of all the small communities had to come together to decide on rules that allow all the communities to function without issues. Over the course of time, they might have realized, “We need to stop killing each other for no reason” – and probably that is where the rule originated.

It is not difficult to realize a community where killing people is not considered wrong, and even that community will have survivors, just that the social interactions over there will be a bit different. It might not be a stretch to say that people from that community will be stronger – even though fewer in number – physically and mentally when compared to people who have lived in a community where killing was deemed to be wrong.

A lot of what we hear around us is in a lot of scenarios some historical rule that has been slowly twisted in such a way to advantage a majority and weaken the individual. We are brought up to live a life, not for ourselves, but for our families, communities, states, countries etc. We are expected to let go of everything we have not just our life, but our sanity for the sake of the majority. And somehow everyone is fine with it. I believe that people are afraid that if the present system were to change, it adds unpredictability that might not be easy to control. How will everyone's individual beliefs interact with each other? It has a potential to go both ways. So rather that thinking and taking the effort to change things, we just pass down what we learnt, because that works.

And if there are people that move out of line, and demand explanations/change? We just get rid of them – we can discredit them, have them disappear behind legalities, put them away in prison, disown them so no one will talk to them, and if nothing works – “properly get rid of them”. You can just look around a bit and you will be able to identify such cases pretty easily.

In such a biased world which looks down on the individual, comes my second basic:

THE INDIVIDUAL IS ABOVE EVERYTHING

Will explain that in a different post, or will extend this some day in future