VICTIMS OF SOCIETY

As one delves into the realm of psychology (no, I do not mean the facebook and whatsapp connotations like "psychology says if a person is always smiling then he/she suffers a lot..(mayiru!!)) the clairvoyance that it shares a deep bond with philosophy is unveiled. Most stoics for example were intuitive psychologists who examined humans irrationalities and provided solutions to tame them. Philosophy can be, to say, the product of conscious understanding of the human mind. Take for example the the evolutionary strategy found in most social animals including humans-reciprocity. The strategy is simple, straightforward and can be considered a fundamental philosophy: Start out nice with everyone and then do unto them what they've unto you. An insight about human nature which my gurunadhar Simbu had mentioned way back in his movie Osthe "na kannadi maari la". Simbu:1 Humans:0. Beyond the obviousness, it is just seen as a cultural norm that just happens to be universal. The topic I wanted to write about however is more about our social environment and its fortuity (/adversity)

When your work involves a lot of travelling amidst fields and green meadows, it grants you the opportunity to be alone with your thoughts (and by thoughts I mean didactic introspections) whilst imagining yourself to be a beardless philosopher. And one such thought is how profusely influenced we are by our social environment and how utterly serendipitous it is that we landed on our status quo. First about the former part. The contours of our conscience get shaped by our close kin- parents, siblings (through praise and blame i.e through positive and negative reinforcement we learn what we can do and what we cant. Love also plays an important part (surf for Bowlby's attachment theory if you wanna learn more about it)) and most of it during the initial years of our life. Thus we can see characters of parents indelibly repeated in their children. 

The other part which shapes our conscience is the social environment in which we find ourselves (friends, religion, culture, traditions, events and experiences, economic conditions) affirmed much by behavioral science. For instance, as I travel to different places/villages and meet its people, its baffling to find certain villages where none of its villagers pay dues (financiers call them default villages) and starkly opposite are other villages where people consider it a shame to not pay their dues on time (financiers often visiting their homes is frowned upon and is an effusive gossip story among the villagers). This is also synonymous with the herd mentality. People not only look around, observe and repeat what others do but a critical insight is that their very capacity for emotions (like guilt and sympathy) are itself hemmed/ molded by the environment. What some consider shameful is a coy strategy for others resulting in their smug satisfaction of having profited. What might be deplorable to one could be admirable to another. Opinions (on subjects like money, women, caste) and their moral indignation's are itself sculpted by the surrounding environment. 

With that established, I cant help but think wouldn't I not have their same beliefs, interests, behaviors had I been born and shaped by that exact environment. Or I daresay, how can anyone be different from the condemned perpetrators while in their same context, upbringing and society. Circumstances define our behavior rather than our personality, one of the common behavioral biases called the fundamental attribution error. "No human being is responsible for his upbringing yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character, behavior and consequentially his actions". It is hubristic to not realize how much luck is involved in our sense of morality itself.

In this light, one cant help but think of criminals as "victims of the society", hapless to have been shaped in and by an environment they had no choosing of; while some of us beneficiaries of our environment, poised with presumptuous decadence. The idea that evildoers have inherent capacity for malevolence irrespective of their upbringing, that they are just born evil is simply fictitious. I don't mean to vindicate the hideous savagery of predators but rather rethink our retributive impulse and our moral justifications for vengeance. Sociopaths still need to be put behind bars and punished as it deters further causation but the more we understand about the adventitious roots of cultivated antipathy the more you realize that the line separating the fortunate (the hero) and unfortunate (the villlain) is all but incidental.

 This blog and so does, I believe, philosophy, does not and can never teach you what to think but only how to think. The inferences and subsequent ethos from this contemplation can be boundless- humility, gratitude to name some whilst could also be seen as the mindless ramblings of someone who has gone bonkers. But for a person who once harbored so much anger, this realization is nothing short of salvation.

"You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm"

PS: It is not my intention to make seem blogs sophisticated through the use of fancy, posh and obscure words but rather because I believe in mot juste- that certain ideas require the right wording/ phrasing.