The right direction to point our finger

It’s well past midnight but a thought has been turning around in my mind space in various forms, moving fast to maturity and relentlessly pushing to be born.

What is it? The spur is the constant pointing fingers that I notice.

The holier than thou attitude of vegetarians, religious fundamentalists and married women. The most recent catalyst to this thought was a judgement made of prostitutes and men who go to prostitutes. Wives hate such husbands and such women. But I want to ask-Is the world and people by nature perfect?  I did ask - Why is there a system of marriage? It is to protect women and children was the expected answer. So, there it is; we all subconsciously know the truth that no relationship is safe in itself, but our conscious mind chooses to live in denial.  

Let’s first think-why have people been educated and taught to behave in a civil way, and why are there laws and punishment? Religions did not exist when man was in the wild. The rules of relationships and marriage were different in the old times when population was much lower. If not for education and directives from religion given at a later stage of civilized living, given by our elders and ancestors, what could have been the result? The result would have been chaos- abuse of all sorts, polygamy, abandoned women, lonely lives willing to do anything to meet their needs, and what not. I don’t care to say it all. So let’s just thank society and religion that things are not any worse than what they are. That situations are not at its worst possible.  It’s all happening under the carpet, but definitely not to the extent it could have if there had not been education, laws and punishment.

But let’s also face the crude facts.

The fact about why it could have been worse. We just shouldn’t deny that animal instincts are given in all. We know that ideally there should have been more women than men in the world. Why does nature decide such a ratio if it favoured monogamy? Clearly man is designed to seed many soils. Living in a civilized world it becomes easy to be judgmental about the wrongs in society and be shocked that there are such men who want more than one woman and forget how people are actually designed by nature. Population was supposed to be controlled by diseases and deaths and attacks from animals, not by preventing man from practicing sex until he gets married or by convincing him to be in monogamous relationships. People are liberating themselves from the shackles of norms and it irks the conservatives. There are problems from that but it doesn’t help being judgmental.

Instead, let’s look at the brighter picture rather than focusing forever on the darker one. Look at those men who follow their education and overcome their natural instincts and care for their woman and children and let’s rather applaud them for doing what might not have been in their nature, than forever admonish those who go astray.

Let's imagine how worse could life have been? I saw a video of how six survivors of a plane crash spent 24 hours in a forest. I realized that no matter how much I might love the forests, looking at them from the safety of my home, I have to accept that the forest is a place of fear and especially so at night. You cannot really sleep at night in the jungle (if per chance you land up in the wild) because if you do, you might become the food of some animal. But social structure as devised by our ancestors allows us to sleep at night not fearing animals; and walk about freely without fear in the day time, not fearing our own kind. Shouldn’t we then thank more than we crib?

We have to accept that the world is in itself a place with challenges for all creatures and let’s not demand a perfect world as if it were our birth right, as if instincts don’t exist, as if ones needs were easy to overlook or suppress because fulfilling it might sometimes mean taking what is another's. Let’s rather thank that we are given a reasonably safe haven in an actually unsafe world. When we start with accepting the truth, we will more easily learn to be happier.

Now, having accepted that the world is unsafe and imperfect and that we are actually given a more than fair deal by the social system, should we refrain from the liberty to point fingers?

For that we have to comprehend what is right and what is wrong. There is actually no rights, but there are the wrongs and then there is the lesser evil. For example, killing an animal for food is an unavoidable evil; plucking a plant for the same purpose is also acceptable as without having food you cannot survive. Whatever you do for survival of yourself and of your species is fair but whatever you do for your greed is unfair. As much as you take for your need is fair to take, as per natures law, but if you are a glutton, it is not appreciated by nature. If it were, there would have been wild animals that suffer from obesity. Well fed ones are easily caught by their predators before they could be called obese.

The same rule of moderation applies to physical pleasures as well. Animals usually have a mating season, they don’t mate all the time.  Throughout the day, they are obsessed with the search for food to survive and so sex is not their primary thought. We, unfortunately, are well fed and with nothing much to do while sitting in front of our computers at work we may think of nothing but sex. Our effort for winning our bread is not as life and death a matter as it was to find food in the wild. So, that is the heart of the problem of excessive sex focus in today’s society. There isn’t enough hunger for food to push down that other instinct.

The wrong then is not being busy enough and overindulgence in pleasures beyond what could be called need. But in which direction does this awareness let us point our finger? When you are well fed and idling away your time for too long, instead of using that time looking at others and pointing at them, please point fingers at yourself, get some productive work to do, and remember that in each one of us the whole world resides.