YOU CANT HELP ANYONE ELSE UNLESS YOU HELP YOURSELF.

Individuals have a greater obligation to themselves. Firstly, so that they can be efficient in the jigsaw of societies workings. It may be hard to comprehend such a notion but it is as true as the saying, “better to clean up your own backyard first,” before you take on anything else. There are two points of view here and one which has appeared as a dilemma in my mind in the past. Firstly, there are a lot of community minded people around who will try to work for the good of society. This is fine if the work is of a positive nature and altruistic but if that same society becomes ego centric and over runs the individual then it is not good. Extreme examples of this have been the various dictatorships we have seen around the world and the classic example is World War 2. Here societies were coerced into brainwashing, ethnic cleansing and the idea of the creation of a master race.

You have the right to be a loner or an individual and have nothing to do with society, and some of the rules and norms with which you don’t agree, in your quest for total freedom. Sometimes life really opens up when you take that chance and think of self before society. The boundaries are no longer there and the sunset is clearer on the open plain than through society’s city smog where people are living together for security. Society, by the way, means, a social mode of life or any social community or an association of persons, but listen to this; the upper classes or people of fashion! So maybe this is what happened in England with all the landed gentry and the lords and ladies and knights of the realm. Maybe this sort of society, which would have bred an arrogance of sorts, was the forerunner of England’s heartless conquests of other lands. Look at Blood river crushing of the Zulus in South Africa and the wholesale shooting of aborigines in Australia and the partition of India with its loss of one million lives. Fighting for king and country made this society ruthless in its hunt for new land and products such as tea and opium. Any individual who did not get involved in such would have seen the immorality of the group government decision reflecting the upper class of society in those days.

So there is this danger of committing one’s self to the majority and then finding there is no way out to regain your self. Once certain societies get hold of power they don’t want to relinquish it and will overrun individuals to hold on to it even at the point of a gun. Look at the closure of television broadcasts in Fiji at the moment, as the military leaders try to keep the outside world out, in their tenuous hold on military coup type power as society’s rulers. There must be many there at the moment who feel their individual expression will be suppressed. In some countries, like the former Iraq, you would be dragged out of your house and shot if you criticized Saddam Hussein. Could we live in a world that respected self expression without society rules? Sounds like Utopia or even Heaven. There would not be the group dynamics of a society, always staring at you asking if your actions are right or wrong. Look at what George Orwell wrote in his novel of the future,1984, and ultimate society control, over the individual. Why Big Brother watched and monitored your every movement.

Sometimes societies can make a difference and especially if you live in a remote area of earth, such as the Australian desert, where the tribal society of the aborigines actually gives strength to the communities to survive in this harsh environment. But without the respect of self the strength of this unit would not grow. It needs every member to give the best of “self talents” to make this ancient form of society efficient. Self development seems to be all the rage these days with so many courses and gyms to attend in the cities. We can only hope as a society that this individual aspect of it can add a variety and richness to life as a whole. The pursuit of self is an endless sea of discovery, for it is like the water free flowing. Do not let the dam walls of society stop this flow and turn it into a stagnant dam.