The castigation of vanity

There always seems to be a large crowd mulling around me wherever I go, and all of them preoccupied with their own businesses. Each man and woman is more obsessed with getting their work done before they can even care to look up and admire. I could stand the whole day in such mess and admire these people, and they call me strange. They all laugh at me because I’m different, but I am only inclined to laugh at them because they’re all the same. What joy do they find in staying the same as everyone else around them? What then does it mean by ‘individual’? You become one among a collective, but once you are tagged as being part of a collective, you lose your individuality. Gone are the days when people found in solace in personality and customization for a freer living. We, today, are more concerned about what the third man will say rather than concentrate on what makes you feel comfortable and at home. And if I seem worried enough to complain, I am, apparently, a freak. They dig and dig and don’t give up at all until they can find something to incriminate their fellow brothers and sisters, and eliminate them from something they call a competition. Like a large boa slithering towards its prey, we are all moving like zombies in the dead of the night unto material riches, while we lose touch with ourselves and our lives. Strange. Conformity to normality has vanished to be replaced by conformity to general agreement, and where that stems from God only knows. I could go on and on about this but I don’t know where to begin. This has been the only thing at the back of my mind for a long time now. And not to be surprised if more comes by. I actually have lots to say, and ask, on this.

Wherefrom springs man’s reasons to visualise Utopia as it stands today?

Segment I

Creation stems from a longing of a body that is not ourselves, even in part. Those who seek to create worlds are most often tainted with corruption already, for the need to define values of your own defies absolutionism and seeks to establish activity and responsibility that deviates from what is true and towards what is relative. One of the more important objectives of nihilism is to establish an independence that pertains to the self, the liberation of the self. In this capacity, the state by assuming overall authority denies complete freedom for the individual and therefore must be abolished. Mankind is not in reach of the absolute, and he has also not realised that the absolute does not exist. By trying to believe in a super power so as to establish a roof for the limits of his thought (assuming the ground to be the evils he is capable of), he has flattened his limits of thinking to what he is accountable for by everyone else around him. What he sees, he is; what he does, he is. Anything that looks like gold to a goldsmith has equal chances of looking swinish to a swine. The culture of the West is another example of the effects of nihilism: the culture is in the last stages of its independent existence and is fast facing collapse in the face of every individual withdrawing into himself so as to propagate what he believes in. Life as such cannot be the reason to live. What then is? Every action that we perform and hold ourselves responsible for can only make bad worse through our own inane action and inaction.

Segment II

A contemporary picture drawn that includes the people we see and meet everyday will always show signs of existential nihilism, a need to destroy oneself and to make morals lose value and to make values lose moral. The very fact that we have defined everything around us based on what we can do and not on something defined as an absolute limits ourselves to spaces within this frame of though. We are only capable of making bad situations worse because of our inability to account for a very many number of factors, or parameters as such, owing to the fundamental establishment of our goal of attaining individual freedon. There is no such thing as selflesness. Every action that we perform and every inaction for whose consequences we claim the responsibility propagates ourselves towards that goal, and as regards them being the constitutional elements of life: life is not worth living solely because of its existence. There must exist higher values and morals. Everyone today boasts of a mask contrived to hide collapsing shells of dependence, dependencies that exist due to the basis of everything on ourselves. The only purpose of God’s existence as such then crumbles into the purpose of unmasking chaos.

Segment III

What is an identity? Does it really define the you? Or is it something more inherent and has been defined just so it can define the you? Beginning at the fundamentals of life and everything else, we are because we decide to be. When we are born, it is with nothing more than the blood in our veins. The new born baby does not even have air in its lungs until it begins to cry. It is the view of many philosophies that when the time comes for one’s death, one should leave with nothing more than the blood in one’s veins: a picture that symbolises the cycle of life and death until one attains moksha, or deliverance, from what is considered a punishment for past sins. When I move on to discussing about where identity fits in in this bigger and more comprehensive picture, the reader will have to know that I am a partial follower of the philosophy that preaches a non-material living in order to accentuate and accelerate the knowing of the inner-self, the state symbolised by complete individual freedom. Getting back to the topic at hand, when you pick up an identity, the ultimate goal, however short lived it may be, should be to give you a home, or rather a shelter, to return to in an argument, a fundamental embodiment of some values and morals that you find reasonable enshrining. An identity must not come to define the limits of your thought, rather the ground or the base from which you can rise in order to search for yourself as to who you are. Anybody who asks himself ‘who am I?’ will construe the question to be answerable by the revelation of an identity, but who YOU are is something completely different: it is more about the question than the answer, which is a discovery of the self more than anthing else. There is no lmit as to how much you can dig in – it is only a matter of you finding peace within yourself. As for an identity, it is but a mask, thought not a wall, to give yourself a face. The purpose of your creation may have very different statements of expression, but the identity behind which you choose to conceal yourself should be picked carefully: it should be such that a continuation of your normal life is promised on the one hand, though what it leads you to believe rests in the other. I, for one, have found that not being associated with any identity as such has benefitted; not that I am a hypocrite or anything, but it has allowed me to think freely and not as someone limited to the confines of a few morals.

Segment IV

Anybody growing up in today’s India is, at some point of time, forced to recognise an identity in some political scenario or the other. In a country where state governments have been set up on the basis of a difference in language, religion will play an important role in the formulation of important policies: if the head of state wants to cater to his people only, the religious principles of the people in question will also have to be catered to in order to imbue a wholesomeness in the service. When so much diversity abounds within a constrained space, it is only expected that people mark their borders with extra care. If you have to survive, those around you must know there is someone as you. If you are to survive, you can not be a hollow vaccuum and stay ignorant of everything else that is going on around you. The Indian political system is now a large network of sewage tunnels, and if you think the same way, you must get into it and start cleaning. Expecting others to do it for you will not work. Indifference will not even feature because you are gradually but firmly pulled into the system, and you are forced to make decisions that you originally would not have considered taking up. When you defend or offend a political party, the poeple around you see not your face, but a mask that behaves like an identity bestowed upon you because of your views on things, whether you want it or not. However, what is sad in today’s situations is that identities have become like football teams. When there is a clash of ideas, a resolution can not be reached via talks. Each party has assumed some ideas and ideals that have been firnly rooted in history in their meaning and purpose, and also have been firmly rooted in the policies of the party. They are rigid. They can not be shaken easily. When there is a clash of ideas, people resort to physical violence like it were something of a sporting campaign: I cheer for A, you cheer for B. If I win, you join me; if you win, I join you. They have brought down higher principles to something of a propaganda issue, instead of respecting them for what they are.

Segment V

The issue of an identity crisis is very widespread in today’s global scenes. When you take up an identity as representing yourself, you are defending some values as close to you. It does not necessitate the offending of another sect of people masked under different identities. Take into consideration the many wars currently raging around the world. People previously living as neighbours fall prey to some frenzied state of aggression and murder and incinerate their ‘friends’ next door. Owing a sense of peace that is completely man-made and not at all natural, men and women around the globe find a need a to guard the identities they have assumed to be themselves. As the fires burn and the weapons are churned out, there is a perpetual need to consume or be consumed in order to believe that one is living or is actually deserving of life. There are some who actually give up the factuality of the availability of options: they surrender the capacity to identify options very early in their lives. Options abound. It is you who are thinking that every identity restricts you to a chosen path. They are not identities. They are decisions made with no relevent information available. Identities can never cross paths. It is not the fault of one man or many that one day you will wake up to find a war raging outside your house because identites have crossed paths. Behind the mask is a face, the face of a man who is calling out to his comrades. Be it a Peruvian, or be it an Indian, or an Argentinian or an Irishman, the only element at work is the human mind. An identity can not become cause because it is the platform you happen to be sitting on. An identity is because it is reality. It is not yours claim as a creation, nor is it yours to apologise for as a mistake. You have taken it upon yourself – you have let it guide you.

Segment VI

Mankind. Mortality. Birth. Death. Living. Power. Freedom. Individuality. Identity. These nine elements characterize the aspects of living of every man and woman on this earth. Mankind as such guides us through life, imbuing in us the values and morals in order to make those decisions that require it. Mortality is a confine within we are destined to remain, and our rise or fall happens within its four walls. Birth and death are significant philosophical and religious aspects that govern our way of thinking and in the formation of a philosophy for the living. Power happens to be man’s ultimate desire: going beyond the need for human companionship, the skill to command it at will draws us more. Freedom is the necessity to force such megalomaniac individuals to relinquish control, and only with freedom can one’s individuality be explored and one’s identity realised. Everything that happens around us, whether as a consequence of our actions or as a subsequence that impacts us through the actions of others, can be attributed to many of these elements. Even the concept of God, and godliness, finds its roots in them. By trying to reach for the absolute, in whatsoever form it is in, we have have begun our journey in realising who we are and what our purpose is. But by believing a God to be existent, we have established the limits of our own capabilities. Man cannot be God. If man is God, then man is not man anymore. And when you put this reasoning into action, you give up on something which may have truly deserved, in favour of the temporary contentment you come to have with what is already in your grasp. When someone says “too much of power or too much of success is not good”, I am prompted to think why not. God exists only in our beliefs, and beyond that superset, nothing can be proved right or wrong because of what we perceive. Even though one might argue that God is a conception of what is beyond our sensibility, God then invariably constructs the limited universe for us. Mankind, in trying to define infinity, has committed a folly in trying to quantify it as well. Infinity, if left to itself, does not seek to limit our reaches, but in placing an almighty entity as the being that quantifies the unquantifiable, we have locked ourselves into finite realms. Why shouldn’t too much of success be good for anyone? Is it that, then, he or she denies a God His stance? Or is it that he or she will then try to breach our limitations as we know them? The traits to misuse it are, however, imbued in our blood. When you don’t want to deny a lion its meat even when in a zoo, you must also know that man is an animal and deserves to be a non-vegetarian just because he exists! It is as nature intended it. By denying ourselves the opportunity to indulge in our exploits, we are inhibiting evolution as it should be. To cut a long story short: God inspires nihilism.

Segment VII

Marriage is an institution that represents the willful agreement between two individuals to spend the rest of their lives together. As such, if you were to go by the definition, religion does not seem to play a role in it. But since the individuals live in a society safeguarded by the state, the state, in its turn, must recognise the existence of this bond and must do the needful so as to let them be represented that way. And therein comes religion. Today’s nations are forged through the integrity of their peoples, an integrity which stems from a belief in themselves. Since the option of a ‘God’ fosters that belief, a religion that encompasses the belief in that God becomes necessary to sustain the individual in his or her moral obligations, as it were. Therefore, when a nation is built from scratch, the individual passes on his or her beliefs and perceptions to the state to which he or she aspires to belong to. Creation is but a mirror of oneself. But here is wherein I think the difference lies. In the establishment of a state, you may seek to pass on your values to the state as well, but the state is a collective that speaks for more than just one man, woman or child. It speaks for everyone around you, and everyone around you is not who you are. The individuality you represented in your oneness now stands dissolved in the face of a nation. This is the difference between individuality and identity. You now assume an identity, and identities only permit you individuality, they do not define it. The religion you embraced in order to give your morals some ground should not be passed on to the whole state in order to bind it rigidly. It then will no longer constitute representation. Those individuals who do not base their faith in godliness will fall outside the moral reaches of the state, and the establishment will then only represent a section of the population although all of them are citizens. This inability to draw a line between two concepts, both pertaining to the self, is the reason behind almost every conflict on this planet.

Segment VIII

1. Institutionalisation
2. Varied perceptions
3. Acceptance
4. State
5. Society
6. Change

I believe that the structure of the world around us today, be it in its religion, politics, science or philosophy, is erected upon the factors I’ve listed above. Institutionalisation recapitulates a fear of change, acceptance defies the basis of varied perspectivism, and the state and society play with each other to deliver a fairly acceptable social system devised on assumptions and history, a fable but agreed upon. For anyone, you, me, him, her, fitting in cosily amongst such chaotic scenery is a laborous task. The various strata that have to be mined through while simultaneously fashioning hopefully sensible opinions and judgments to gauge the nature of the people around you alone will take up a sizable chunk of your time; all this while you chalk out a superficial make-up to plaster on your face and choose willingly to assume the personality of someone else in a moment of self-loathing and on a whim of just thinking that these are matters to be bypassed in favour of convenience as well as a strongly denied sensation of escapism: our society is a maze.

Every time someone says “life is too short for all this”, I am only prompted to think. Obvious principles of argumentation has us all know that a true and infallible argument is that which is absolute in its standing and fundamental in its logic: it must be that a statement doesn’t exist which can negate the facts quoted in the infallible argument. Saying ‘life is too short fo all this’ is not absolute. If one were to take up the chronological aspects of living, all we have for our consideration are the inhabitants of the planet we ourselves live in: animals, birds. If one were to narrow the comparisons down to sensible footings, we only have the people around us to compare with. In this frame of thought, ‘life is too short’ is a statement without meaning. What are we gauging it against? Against the lifespan of others around us, people with the same biological composition as you and me. If you have 100 years to live and also think that life is too short, are you trying to say others around you try to live longer? And that is just but the chronological aspect of it! The state of which they are citizens, the society of which they are social units, the world of whose theatrics they are spectators – we are part of a similar society, a parallel state and the same wide world.

However, while stating all this, I do not enforce upon others that they take to the logical factors just as favourably as I do. All I am trying to establish is that although it is taken for granted that ‘life is too short’ is a convenient option to bypass those moments that have you making tougher decisions, it is also escapism because it is logically faulted through the inherent convenience itself.

Segment IX

Whenever I have been confronted with the need to ponder upon knowledge, the first thing that comes to my mind is its elemental standing. If you were to question me here, I will confess that ‘elemental standing’ is a term I have coined to imbue the element in question with the duty to declare its purposes with reference to mankind in general. The world we have built for ourselves is a world of extreme dynamicity and deeply rooted materialism. In such a basket, it is hard for anyone to stop for a moment and think as to why it is all the way it is. The innate ability to open a mind’s eye in the darker corners of our brain and perceive things differently has given birth to civilisation – a mensurable parallel to its biological counterpart of evolution. And today, it is too late to rewind through 4,000 years of civilisation and try to pin down the one thing that started it all. However, that is obvious: the quest for knowledge. The very purpose of evolving eyes is to see, ears to hear, skin to feel. Blame it on panspermia, divinity or luck, here we are.

For a civilisation spree sparked off by the want to know more by the second, it is only natural that what we have with us today is a scenario that is stable only as long as there are knowledgeable people to handle it. Now, knowledge, as it were, is a summation of all that we know, but just because such a thing exists doesn’t mean it is a necessity; those people who are devoid of the thirst to know more aren’t invalids. They are a hindrance, yes, but not an anomaly. Knowledge, by its existence, only confirms that it can exist, and the purpose we have assumed for ourselves – that of to know more – has nothing to with it. This is a very important point: knowledge and thought are different. When we think that we need to civilise along the same lines as our ancestors, we reach out to the pool of knowledge and partake from it. When civilisation is no longer a serious concern, as in when we are at the top of a graph that dictates sensibilities, knowledge separates itself from the pool of humanity per se.

(Imagine I am mixing up a bit of coffee. The mug being a metaphor of the absolute container, the coffee powder is humanity and water, knowledge. When the person holding the mug – in effect, the goal we have set for ourselves, the definitive plot of civilisation that we chart out – wants to have some coffee, water is poured into the mug and mixed. Coffee consists of the separate ingredients of powder and water, but it is coffee only when they are together. Similarly, the need to civilise consists of the perpetrators of the actions (mankind) and the knowledge that facilitates it. When they separate, it may or may not be civilisation as it originally was or was needed to have been.)

Segment X

Imagine a dream. Imagine that you are free to pursue that dream. Imagine a world that imposes no constraints, no bonds, no chains of wrought iron that bind you down to the earth. Imagine you are part of that world, imagine you are free, and imagine you have only one dream. Would this be your Utopia? Or tell me, why would it not be? Is it not everyone’s dream? It is my dream, and I think that it should be everyone’s. Tonight, that dream is beckoning me. I dream that I stand in front of my class. I dream that one of my professors is asking me to promise the class that I will be a part of that class. That I will do what ever that class is asked to do. That I will not be different from any of them, and when they refer to the class, they refer to me, to you, to him, to her, to my friends, my enemies. I dream that I stand in front of such a class, and tell them of this dream. Would they understand? Would they understand what pursuing such a dream means? I think not. But, the class has not let me down. I have not let the class down by not being a part of it: the people around me mean so much to me. But all I can think of at the end of the day is that, am I any different? However, I know I am not. There is no individuality left in me.

Our dreams, they say, are for us to dream. They make us do the same things, the same tasks. Again and again, till the work process becomes subconsciously triggered whenever I hear someone speak of it. They teach us the same lessons, but they say the difference lies in what part of the lesson we choose to learn. He learns the beginning, and he wants to pursue it till the end of his life. She learns the end, and she wants to pursue it till the end of her life. My friend learns everything, and he wants to do all of them for the rest of his life. They laud them, they clap every time such a dream is spoken. But why is that when I choose to learn nothing, they pity me? Isn’t not wanting to learn anything a lesson by itself? The world they paint in front of my eyes is not the world I want to belong to. My dream lies else where, and they choose not to recognise that dream. I don’t know why. They say they will involve my parents in such issues. Tell me, is that supposed to threaten? Because it doesn’t. Not one bit. And when I say I am only prone to laughing at such statements, they say I am mad. They say I am disoriented, and that I don’t where I am heading in life. Tell me, do choices exist that no one else has ever made? Because no one seems to recognise it. The only choices any one seems capable of recognising are the ones they have made, or the ones they have heard made. To dream is to lose hope in this world. It is not a perfect world, and now I know that it has never been. And a glowering fear inside of me dictates that I can never hope to be part of such a world.

When I stand in front of my class which such ideas in my mind, will they understand? I think that when I can, they should be able to. Unfortunately, they are not. Every where I turn, someone or the other has an explanation that reflects materialism. They fail to recognise that my happiness does, in fact, lie elsewhere. Again, the only choice they know exists is the one they could have made, would have made or should have made. A choice doesn’t exist that hasn’t already been made. What then is the meaning of a dream? I will always ask myself this. Perhaps one realises all of this only when one loses the grasp of a previous dream, a first dream. I question every corner, but they either hold on to a preconceived notion like a babe holds on to the finger of its mother a few days after birth, or they have already let go, surrendering their destiny to a stranger. There only remains a corner which I haven’t already asked these questions, but I don’t want to ask. Why? Because I am afraid of the answer the corner has in store for me. That corner is the small part of my mind I wish to leave open to explore. That is the kind of hope this world instills in me: a blind hope.

For the last time, imagine this: you are in a free world; that you are in a world that does not remind you of the ground; that you are in a world that does not remind you of your insecurities by asking you to remember that the sky is far, far away, and sometimes that it doesn’t even exist. Imagine you are a part of such a world. If this is the world you want to belong to, then ask yourself just one question: do you have it in you to sculpt such a world for yourself?