"Blessed is he who expects nothing; for he will never be disappointed."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jonathan Swift.

I am sure that there is no dispute that our society is very sick these days. In fact, in some parts of our great country society seems to be in the intensive care unit, just about breathing with the help of oxygen and artificial respirators. If the latter are withdrawn society might even collapse! Even if one comes out of the intensive care unit at the end of the day one will still be not completely normal again. It is like mending a broken glass with strong glue. It is broken glass anyway even after mending. This applies to human life as well. To keep man healthy is our best bet and is very inexpensive too. This applies to societies as well. However good the mending could be scars of the damage are always there to remind us of the mistakes that we have done in not keeping the society intact in the first place. Ever since man started living in-groups, on the fertile banks of major rivers in all the continents nearly ten thousand years ago, there have been misunderstandings, wars, misery and pestilence in the world. But to the best of my information there never was a time like ours. The present era could be best described in the words of the author of The Tale of Two Cities. The twenty-first century is the best of times (if one considers the so-called scientific developments) and also the worst of times, when one critically looks at human development. Modern civilization, so called by the western thinkers, is, if anything, taking man more towards his animal instincts and even worse. No animal would want to kill another of its species unless forced to do so under special circumstances of hunger. Today man eats man even when he is fully fed!

Aetiology of the sickness:

What ails human societies all over the world today? Monetary economy brought all the misery in its wake. Study of the aboriginal races off the coast of Saskatchewan in Canada, the inhabitants of Innuland, the Innus, shown by their epigraphic history for more than five hundred odd years, gives the clue to the above conclusions. Innus were a strong race of hunter-gatherers and up until 1732 AD they had a sustenance economy where every one of the members was looked after well. This egalitarian set up got upset when, for the first time in 1732, a Church came to Innuland with the love of God. Dependence started and the next in line was the Williams Company dealing in hides which taught the Innu to barter his hide for fancy articles like soap, biscuit etc. To cut the long story short, today every Innu is a Canadian citizen with all the rights and conveniences of other European Canadians, based on their monetary (later plastic card) economy. Innus in their earlier avatar did not suffer from any major illnesses and lived far beyond one hundred years. Today every Innu is heir to all the illnesses, major and minor, that a European Canadian gets-and that too precociously. The only thing that has changed for the Innu is the ravages of the monetary economy in place of the egalitarian sustenance economy. There are other studies done in the US, the Roseto study, and another done in Chile by Cruz Coke and colleagues, all of which showed similar trends. Money, therefore, is the be all and end all of human misery. Today money, with its power, has become our God and making money our religion. To that end in view we have discovered many new methods of hating one another in the name of nationality, region, religion, caste, colour, language, and what have you.

Management of the Sickness:

As is the practice in modern medicine, so in social matters we look for quick fix solutions to all our problems. The latter invariably would have deep-rooted causes, which never get corrected with these quick fixes. However, the immediate solutions look good on the face of it and delude us temporarily. The malady recurs with greater intensity sooner than later. This has been happening each time something serious happens in society. We still do not ponder to think of long lasting solutions to prevent the sickness. In medicine also prevention does not work well when once the disease has set in and the process goes on simmering under the cloak of temporary relief, called palliation in Latin. Quick fix curative and/or dramatic palliative solutions have not been successful in medicine and will not be successful in any other field as well.

Be that as it may, let us think of keeping society tranquil and promoting its health. This could only be done through proper education of the future generation. Health of a nation, as the health of an individual, could only be preserved through promotion of the disease resisting immune system. Proper education of the future generation, giving them the right attitude to life of co-operation and camaraderie, alone could keep all of us happy. This new education should start right from day one in school, if not at home, as the child is growing up in the preschool years as well. In addition to the external, objective, intellect based knowledge that the present educational system imparts we have to include internal, intuition based, subjective knowledge of the self to the child and make it realize early on in life to know that it is here to live for others. Truth, ethics, social responsibilities are to be added on as we go along.

This is fine for another generation. What will happen to the present generation, most of whom are converts to the hatred ethos of the present generation that is trying to take the world for a ride in the name of making money? There should be a promotive solution for that segment of the society as well, lest we should all perish before the new generation takes charge of the affairs of running this world armed with the new methods of education.

Let us take our lessons from the other wings of society where similar situations obtain. Let us take the curative medical care system as an example. Time was when doctor was considered only next to God and the patient had immense faith in the system. That placebo effect was the one that kept us alive on this planet. In fact, analysis showed that in the past such horrible things like animal urine, skin scrapings, metallic ashes, and all kinds of herbs were used in medicine all over the world. Today we claim to have the most scientific remedies! However, audits have consistently showed that the per capita death did not appreciably change in the last hundred odd years that we claim to have methodical remedies and surgical procedures. Rather, they have shown that we are worse off marginally now.

This is not suprising. Healing of any damage has to be ultimately done by the body's immune system and the best stimulation for that comes from the mind of the sick individual. The latter depends on the patient's confidence in the treating doctor. Technology has taken medicine to the market place making the doctor the seller of that technology and the patient a buyer-a classical monetary economic ethos. With the onset of the consumer movement in medicine, the time honoured doctor-patient relationship has all but vanished, resulting in all types of misery. In many areas doctors have, in fact, become a menace to society! Recently doctors went on strike in Israel for three months and the death rate and morbidity statistics went down dramatically making society much healthier! All those parameters came back to the old levels when once doctors came back to work. It is rumored that the morticians are the one's that brokered a peace between the striking doctors and the government as they had very bad business during the strike period.

Let us take the legal field. More laws in any country there is less justice. Justice delayed, that is the situation now in many countries, is literally justice denied. Civil litigation sometimes takes more than one generation to fructify. Criminal litigation depends on many extraneous factors that rarely does one get justice. Some cynic recently wrote that if one wants justice one must never go to the courts. This must have been even in times past. King Ferdinand of France, while sending his people to colonize the newly found Indies in the New World, had one strict rule that no one who has studied jurisprudence should be included in the group so that the people there at least could live in peace. This may be one of the reasons why our parliament does not function effectively, as most of the honorable members there are trained in that area!

Crime and its punishment is another area that society uses to treat its maladies. I do not feel that this system has achieved its avowed objectives. A criminal punished becomes a hardened criminal when he comes out of the jail. Reformation of the guilty is a more difficult job. In this area the latest menace seems to be intolerance that we call as terrorism. Each kind of terrorism emanates from some kind of intolerance of another's point of view. It may be in the field of religion, politics or economics but intolerance it is to start with. Criminal system is not the final answer. It is like the bypass surgery for coronary artery disease, palliating the smoking fire within that eventually destroys the whole system. Even the might of the great American nation could not contain Bin Laden's onslaught. Lot of innocent lives get lost in the bargain, just as billions of healthy body cells get destroyed when we burn cancers in the human body with radiation and powerful chemicals!

What is the remedy?

Having defined the problem let us now think of the solution. The only solution could come from the people themselves. As shown above any government, the police system, army, or the judiciary can not impose the solution. The media and the political outfits only aggravate the disease, although the media is supposed to apply a soothing touch. Most of the time they are so partisan that they incite more trouble while they try to fish in troubled waters to gain some mileage in their struggle for one upmanship or for money.

How does society empower the common man to do this job? By inculcating in them the power of understanding one another using the regular promotive dialogues between different sections of the society-be it with reference to different religious practices, or settling other disputes without involving any external agency, be it the government, politicians, the media, the judiciary or even the officialdom. Every single village must have a creative dialogue society-call it the Socrates club, if you will-where people meet in the evenings and thrash out their differences, there were many Indian versions of this method but I have refrained from quoting from them lest I should be labelled not progressive in my thinking. The following Ten Commandments, based on the Socrates Clubs elsewhere, should guide them.

• Honour others, and listen to them deeply with all your heart and mind.
• Focus on the agenda while seeking the common ground for consensus, but avoid group-think by acknowledging the diversity of views.
• Refrain from irrelevant and intemperate interventions.
• Acknowledge others' contributions to the discussion before relating your own remarks to theirs.
• Remember that silence also speaks; speak only when you have a contribution to make.
• Identify the critical points of difference for further deliberations.
• Never distort other views to further your own.
• Formulate the agreements on any agenda item before moving to the next.
• Draw out the implications of an agreement for group policy and action.
• Thank everyone for his or her contributions.

Let these Ten Commandments guide our villagers and train them to help themselves. Outside interference of any sort should be prohibited. Let them sort out their differences themselves, as was done by that great philosopher Socrates even in a hostile society. Compassionate dialogue is the only way and the most legitimate weapon for realizing a peaceful society. If this is done on an all India basis the governments become irrelevant in the common man's life. This will lessen the importance of elections the way we have them now, bringing down the money power of the politicians. With that deprivement they will come on their knees to the people to get their votes. Even voting in any election should be based on this kind of a dialogue for the common good.

The mega projects and the open markets have only impoverished the masses further. We could, through the dialogue method go back to micro-economic developments of small holding farmers to work together to make agriculture profitable. It is only by developing villages will our country come out of the bottomless pit into which it has sunk, thanks to the monkey tricks of our politicians and their goons. Non governmental agencies should come forward to help the poor and the less fortunate. Future belongs to these NGOs. Governments in many countries will have to become irrelevant to the common man's life very soon. The day is not far off when the ordinary man would run his own life without any help from the corrupt powers-that-be. "Cure rarely, comfort mostly but console always" has been the motto of so called curative medicine. Promotive health is the future of health care delivery. Promotive societal health might save this world from total annihilation.

God! What sort of heart are you going to give us?
Anon.