Inside out

The option is the power, opportunity or right of an individual to make a choice. It is the epicentre from which the shock waves of life radiate. What does it matter if you will agree with me or not, because consensus means nothing unless first there is an option. Your thoughts are as good as my thoughts. Everybody dares and nobody cares unless option makes connection with choice, and then builds the road to a social destination.

Edmund Burke, the Irish man of letters, said that society was indeed a contract, a partnership not only between those who were living, but also between those who were living, those who were dead, and those who were to be born. Thus the social destination of man is a manifestation of his destiny, which unfolds in the backward and forward linkages of his existence. He will be, therefore he is and he was, the earthly life being the mere footprints of a journey that starts before him and lasts after him as well.

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There are rituals amongst societies where the dead is offered meals at the gravesite. The Egyptians of ancient times buried their kings inside pyramids with treasures, food and slaves in the belief that they would continue to live after death. Religions believe in life after death, the resurrection on the Day of Judgement and then settling down in heaven or hell. The body halts in death, then decomposes, while the soul ejects like the pilot of a crashing bomber and then lands in a mysterious land between this world and the next.

So, birth is as much a phase of life as death, existence of man pronounced whether the breath is inhaled or exhaled. The life that never was before it congealed in a womb and the life that never will be after it has thawed in a grave, it is the entity that changes from one state to another, while the essence remains the same. If you wish to know, this is the connection between the unborn, the living and the dead.

That makes society a halfway house between the origin and the destination of man. The family is merely a rite of passage, parents, siblings, spouses and children marking nothing but the trail of life that has come and gone. An English scholar named Hugh Kingsmill observed that society was based on the assumption that everyone was alike and no one was alive. Life is repeated in person after person like a motion picture where a sequence of consecutive photographic images projected onto a screen in such rapid succession as to give the illusion of natural movement.

It's the rapid succession of deaths, which gives the illusion of life. People appear to disappear, live to die, whirling and swirling in their transitory permanence, the motion of life captured in its continuous arrest. It's said that what meditation teaches is the ability to make choices. Which means there are options, which rise from the depth of blood and density of flesh, which can be comprehended when one concentrates on the inner self and immerses in the subtle forces that operate inside. Options are like combustion in an engine, firing the choices, which fire the instincts, which propel the locomotion of life.

That accentuates the protocol of body with soul. One must stay in touch with the other, because the soul inhabits the body as much as the body exhibits the soul. This is why a person often turns inward to find inner strength, his spirit exhausted by external causes looking for succor from internal effects. Prayer, meditation, penance and repentance are nothing but instruments, which hold a man within himself.

But creature comfort gives indulgence to the body and neglects the soul. Need is the seed of greed, which bleeds the soul. Every time the body is pampered, the soul is ignored, and it starts the alienation of one from another. It bloats the body and depletes the soul. In the end, the body loses touch with the soul like a candidate loses touch with the constituency.

English detective fiction writer Dorothy Sayers writes in Creed or Chaos that a society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand. What happens to the individual in such a society? He is merely a chute in the waste disposal system, his soul creaking under the accumulating burden of trash carried by his body.

So, there is the disconnect. The plug is in the socket but there is no contact, no electricity. A sound human is the function of body and soul, powered by passions and emotions discharged in the harmony between them. The harmony gives balance, which gives equilibrium, which gives judgement. The judgement brings choice, which brings preferences, which creates inclinations, which shape instincts that package the individual.

Aristotle observes that if a man is unable to live in society, or if he has no need because he is sufficient for himself, he must be either a beast or a god. A social animal cannot be sufficient for himself, and he cannot hibernate either in his body or soul. But he can neither let one harass the other. If he does he becomes a disjunct, lonely in the crowd, the odd man out, the mental case.

There is then a thin line between man and society, and that thin line is, once again, the contact between body and soul. Where that contact is remiss, individuals alienate from families, families alienate from neighbourhoods and the society is an archipelago where the individual islands aren't connected. Selfishness is but a variation of that isolation, when a man is in excessive contact with himself only either in his body or in his soul, but not in both. Selfish people often extend that contact to their families, giving preference to their own wellbeing over the good of the commonwealth.

It results in the Brownian motion. Individuals go in different directions like particles suspended in a liquid or gas medium, bringing collisions, which imprecate chaos. Families remain a loose cluster of individuals and neighbourhoods remain a loose cluster of families, whereas the society is no more than wandering tribes within an organised concept.

We need to turn that society inside out, and the individuals need to take a hard look at what is inside them. Familiarity is like charity, which begins at home. There is no society unless, first, you have known and understood who you are and what it is about.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.