Who is responsible?
Life is sometimes a sacrifice and one has to live it at all times for others. Strange I thought society came into being because man couldn’t exist alone on his own. Now the society like a parasite has got man entrapped as its host. Gradually it sucks his life blood, his independence and his identity dry till there is nothing but a worthless shell left. His spirit crushed under rules and regulations. Discipline they call it, culture they call it, traditions and legacy……do we really have a legacy? We are no different from the rats who followed the pied piper to their doom. A few self righteous, cultured people set examples for spineless mortals with no originality who feels the need to cling to something and pretend that it’s original and not something followed by hundreds of such like people.
Or is it a legacy of slavery? A slavery born out of what few ‘wise’ people thought to be right for men. Sometimes I feel that man was originally better off free alone and with a will of his own, even if it meant that he had poor standards of living…and lived his life like a pauper…vagabond…scavenger WHATEVER!...AT LEAST HE LIVED IT TO THE FULLEST AND FREE IN SPIRIT.
Now he is left shackled in nothing but a will to support his family and friends, a will to do what is considered right off him. Religion too is a manifestation of what society deemed as the right conduct to be followed. This was originally meant to chanelise the untamed violent nature of man, but turned out that it changed his very essence. Where we had originality and independence, now we have servile docility and dependency.
My question to you is who has the right to decide what is right and what is wrong. No human is so evolved that he can take the right to decide the fate of his other fellowmen. The choice of our way of living should rest with us, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t live responsibly. Just as the onus of our actions rests on our shoulders, the onus of the consequences rests there too. And in taking decisions a truly evolved human being will not do anything that will jeopardize the balance of someone else’s life…just our own. Responsibility sometimes takes out the spectacular out of lives…for example many things considered deleterious for humans like smoking etc would be original choice…
However this situation wouldn’t arise with freedom of action and thought. Everyone is responsible for his own action; we just don’t follow people into the well just because they are doing it and because it’s the ‘happening’ thing to do. we do things based on our own judgment of whether it suits me and is right for me. Let the decision be left to the individual. Children should be allowed the freedom to exercise their intellect once they are old enough to take decisions for themselves. This is one thing I like about the western world. They allow the freedom of choice. If I have a kid and he wants to smoke then he should be mature enough to take the consequences thereof. I can only help him evaluate his choices. If he hence decides to go and start smoking, the onus of the decision should rest on his shoulders because the decision is his and not mine. similarly I should not be quoted as an example of poor parenting, because I believe parents help the children to grow up and mature decision making is a part of growing up…not making the kid lead a plastic life closed up in a compartment called “parental guidance” where he doesn’t learn the meaning of real-time decision making because he has never learnt how to make them and take responsibility for the consequences.
I always advocated the naturalist way of learning. Let his fall and learn the pain that comes from falling. Let him touch fire and know that it can burn. Learning through others mistakes as people call it isn’t really learning. as for me I would be obviously there to pick up the pieces as people would say. that is the most difficult part of parenting. Give all the inputs possible and watch them make a mess of their lives help them gather strength back to start all over again, so that they may learn to make mistakes, correct them and make them no more. That is what I envisage. That is my dream for a world governed by free will.
1 comment:
I love this post...A lot of thinking for me to be done on it :)
First...There is nothing called sacrifice. There is only choice. When one is chosen over something else, we cannot say that we have sacrificed the latter for the former.
Second...Society helps or goes against us depending on how we are looking at it. Wherever we are in this world, we can change our lives if we choose to. We may not be able to decide when we will be born or when we will die (Unless we take the extreme step of suicide, which in itself is not a decision taken with much thought). Culture can be absorbed by us in two ways, one by practicing it without thinking and other by understanding the reasons and then practicing it. If we take the latter, we are free since we understand the pitfalls of the other and know how to enjoy life more without these pitfalls atleast.
Second...if the responsibility of considering the needs of the family and friends is thought of as just chains on the individual, then the person may as well chuck it since there is no more happiness in giving to them and this is felt by them also. The individual may as well follow the originality and independence that is craved since it will not be long before the individual returns realizing what it is that has been lost by leaving family and friends. Then the individual will no longer feel the loneliness present since the interdependence sets in and thus happiness.
Fourth...No one has been given the right to decide the right of other fellow men. Only guidelines have been give for scrutiny by others and if they want, it can be followed, else, discarded.
Fifth...Responsibility is not one which takes out the spectacular out of our lives, rather it is one which brings it in. As for following a person into a well, believe me...it happens. It was in the psychology books also. It was the incident of the Jonestown which can be read about in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
But more details can be seen only in the book by Morris where it was told how the people willingly took poison to die.
About letting people to smoke, it is known that addiction to smoking occurs mainly when the individual starts to smoke in the teens. If the individual starts to smoke in his 20's the chances of him being addicted are far lesser. And also about maturity, a 20 year old person can sometimes be seen to exhibit the maturity of an eight year old :P So when do we leave the person to his freedom? There are many now who say that their bad habits are the fault of their parents since they were not stopped when they were kids and now they are addicted to them.
About letting them learn the hard way, only some mistakes should be taught the hard way in my opinion. If it is about playing with fire, the child can be burnt and after that the child can know that it is dangerous. But if it is something like, not to go with strangers who give food for free, then the child will have to be told in no uncertain terms that it is a strict no-no. There is no learning the hard way in this case.
One of my favourite quotes is Life is too short to learn by our own mistakes alone, learn from others.
In dreams, Utopia presents itself but if logic is applied the negatives are also seen which in itself is not a bad thing if they can be corrected by certain measures.
I guess my comment is as long as the blog now :P Just my opinion for you to consider :)
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