Society Must Decide for Itself the Future It wants to Bequeath

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Society is a complex organism. One with many faces, many rules, many seeking to enforce those rules, many cultures and subcultures, many institutions. Whatever the many facets, the one near constant is change in all of them.

The many faces change. You see a beggar on your street one day, and the next day he is gone.

The rules change. At the busy canteen down the road, you pre-pay for a fixed amount of food, but at the temple not far away, you get food - as much as you want, for free.

The many cultures and subcultures coexist - some happily part of the whole, some with latent tension. The urban rich throw money at meaningless pleasure, while the urban poor who breathe the same air watch in hunger and jealousy, with no mutual empathy.

Change is, but, inevitable. Still, in the last 70 years, change has been more rapid than ever before with society choosing to hunger for material wealth and pleasure above all else. It is not that the rich, the letch or the ungrateful did not exist in the 19th century and centuries past, but in the late 20th century these qualities were increasingly seen by those with loose morals as the only goals in life; and of course the others had to compete, for to be jealous and to covet is human.

No longer did one need to work hard even when not watched. The protestant work ethic in the West is long gone, it being replaced by a take-all-you-can non-ethic that is appreciated and rewarded. No longer must the thief hide his booty; he can place it on his fireplace for all to see. For, the wretch that he stole from had in turn stolen from another, weaving a tangled web around the whole town that could no longer be untangled.

The adolescent boy need no longer prove his honest intentions to society and the girl's parents when asking for her hand. His comrades had resolved to free themselves from the tyrannical society they lived in that asked too much of them, and it was a worthy enterprise. In the institution that they had just created, contentment was not spoken of, and their ranks kept swelling. And what if the girl's parents themselves were in the ranks? 

Each nation or clan has sought, at some point in their existence, to lay down new ground rules for their society. Most Eastern civilizations have long held intellectual development, philosophical inquiry, oneness with nature, the arts, and the containment of sensory pleasures as their lofty goals. Not only was this on a personal level, but society cooperated in this common goal by maintaining the right environment for the journey towards its achievement. With a mutually held set of values and society acting as a mirror, children were safe, men and women were content with one another, the village well was kept pristine for its precious water, and the teachers imparted education for the purpose of creating brave, intelligent, and kind men and women who they could call their students and the future of the world around them.

The common thread for this seemingly-utopian society can only be the common good, not the individual's pleasure. 

Our society of today has ground rules that transform themselves faster than a chameleon. One day, the accountant's duty was to be honest, and the next day he is expected to obfuscate as much of the truth as possible. And, without conformance, his family would go hungry. With conformance would come not just the erosion of what remains of his ethical values, but the birth of a new generation with a fraction of the values that were left in him. Change may only be visible when comparing subsequent generations now, but given the thousands of years that man has existed,  significant change for the worse with every passing generation does not augur well for the future.

Every now and then some in society take it upon themselves to (re)establish a set of values that will carry into several future generations and benefit the nation immensely. The establishment of the Sikh community, with a singular focus on hard work, bravery and selfless service to their like and brethren, is one such beacon for others to admire and adopt, even in these degenerate days. Without them, the bloodbath around our newly erected borders would have created not puddles but lakes.

Rituals, symbols, and values all come together to define the ground rules for a society's present and more importantly its future. Without these, society will only be a large mass hurtling towards certain oblivion.