The tyranny of society

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The Tyranny of Society

By Ranjan Yumnam *

You don’t need to be a Harvard trained sociologist to know some inescapable facts about the Manipuri society. It’s suffocating. It cramps your style. It kills your originality.

And worse, it leaves you with no room for individual choices. Which is to say, if were born a Manipuri and living in Manipur, you would be compelled either to be a conformist or a pariah.

I don’t want to be any of these two monsters. So what do I do? The first option is to leave Manipur and go east, west, north or south and that, my dear friend, is a cowardly Ostrich like reaction.

The second option is to adapt to the mysterious ways of the society and be a carbon copy of your neighbor who would shed crocodile’s tears for you in your hours of distress but would nevertheless make a topic out of it in the ever bustling tea stalls of the leikai.

The third option is a compromise: assert your individuality in the resplendent garb of society’s favourite conventions.

In these circumstances, compromise is a pragmatic path to take because the grip of the society over its members is great, perhaps insurmountable. What society expects of you is to be a conformist on its pet terms, be another standardized cog in the wheels of its status quo-ist apparatus.

If you stray off the beaten path that the majority laid out for you, it will straighten you up, so to say. And if you were born with a streak of independence and a mind of your own, God help you. It reminds me of what Ralph Waldo Emerson said,

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most requests is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs."

Customs seem to be there not for maintaining a fine social equilibrium but to deprive individuals of their eccentricities and geniuses. The group-think dictates what you should say and do and increasingly how you should behave in the bedroom as well.

I can imagine a day when this society will impose on me what colour of jacket I should wear to office and what brand of underwear I should pick up from the supermarket on what day. If you protest, you pay a heavy price in the form of social alienation and your name becoming the butt of jokes and consternation in the ubiquitous hotels of leikais — the equivalents of British coffee houses minus the intellectual culture.

It’s a sad commentary of our people and times that many of the ills of our so-called infallible society are its own bastards. Corruption, for example, is also a creature of the society that has had a love-hate relationship with its benefactors.

I am not sure what this society really wants: whether it favours rooting out corruption or perpetuating it. The mirrors of popular culture like dramas, cinemas and literature, to name a few, reveal clearly how our society co-opts corruption as an effective way of attaining social mobility.

There is nothing hush-hush anymore about graft—it’s the done thing, a given not be messed up with. But again, it’s the same society that cries foul and pretends to be outraged at instances of corruption in public life at the slightest of hint (remember the MPSC hearsay?).

There are two yardsticks by which society labels any wrongdoing as corruption. An act of corruption is corruption only if it is caught in broad daylight. Corruption is not corruption if it benefits you.

The menace thrives on selective amnesia, oversights and plain condonation. You look away if it is in your favour; you scream if it enriches your neighbor. Are you really against corruption or does its meaning shift according to the matrix of the situation?

The challenge is in protecting and asserting your individuality above this deadly cocktail of conformity and hypocrisy. It might frustrate you because the odds are heavily arraigned against you. Consider what the character of Holden in “The Catcher in the Rye” by JD Salinger felt when he found it difficult to fit in a world full of hypocrites trying to outdo one another in the Big Game of Hypocrisy.

“It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.”

Yes, the cliques. And society is the largest clique. Ayn Rand in her seminal novels-cum-treatises, “The Fountainhead” and the “Atlas Shrugged” ranted against this suffocating hold of the society over the freedom of the individual.

Objectivism, the credo that she proposed for the freewill proponents, advocates that “..the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or "rational self-interest"; that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual human rights...”

She further said,

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Dear Ayn Rand, I am sorry. Your philosophy has no takers in Manipur. We simply can’t be heroes. The moral purpose of our Manipuri lives is not our own happiness but to seek the concurrence of the scaffoldings of the society. And reason, dear Rand, is not the absolute virtue here; the social norms are.

One of the criticisms that free thinking liberals like me has had to encounter often is the accusation that we are selfish people unmindful of the world surrounding us. That’s rubbish.

The only thing that we are suggesting is that individual excellence and freedom of actions and thoughts will lead ultimately to the Greater Common Good and that there should be minimum interference into what a person does in his private life. As John Stuart Mill maintained correctly, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”.

Liberty is at stake in our Manipuri society that seems to be going backward in the name of customs. The despotism of custom, as JS Mill might have said, has become the standing hindrance to our advancement, being forever in opposition to an individual’s endeavour to accomplish something better than is customary.

But there is hope yet. If you can’t fight the system, join the system. In this case, if you are up against the walls of social conventions and you see the dead-end, use the same conventions to overcome them.

Here’s the golden rule: Fight conventions with conventions. Believe me, nobody would complain if you follow the rules of the game written by the society and win it in its own turf.

Of course, detractors might counter by pointing out to you that Manipur is not America—the haven of individual liberty. Take it easy; that’s not a defense for what our society is not. That sounds to me like an apology. The tragedy, precisely, is that Manipur is not America.

Am I a demagogue or someone trying to rouse a social revolution? Hell no.

Maybe I am a misfit in this society. So be it.

*** E-mail may be quoted by name in Ranjan Yumnam's readers section, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise.

* Ranjan Yumnam is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He has recently started a new column in The Sangai Express print version, under the label Whistleblower and a weblog - Whistleblower and can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com
This article was webcasted on September 22, 2007.

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